Tuesday, July 22, 2008

barackobama@gmail.com

Some guy named Guru Raj created barackobama@gmail.com on July 27, 2004, back when gmail was invitation-only and Barack Obama was just "the young senator from Illinois who was giving the Democratic keynote address on TV." According to the latest New Yorker, which devotes a short item to this tale of email impersonation, Raj "now receives some sixty e-mails a day addressing the Senator, most of them in foreign languages, especially Russian."

That sounds low; my inbox shudders under the weight of several times that number daily, not counting spam, and I'm not running for President. But I'm also not a fictional Hail Mary pass into the ether. Not for most people, anyway.

The New Yorker article on barackobama@gmail.com

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