If a card that reads "you're too hot to be out of action -– I got diagnosed with herpes since we played" ends up in your inbox, think twice before marking it spam.
A public health Web site called Inspot.org has put the trend of e-cards, e-mail, and e-vites to a unique purpose: the e-postcard that notifies you that a past sexual partner came down with a sexually transmitted disease or infection.
The sender can choose the STD, and whether to disclose their name, while Inspot.org will automatically send a list of local health resources to the recipient.
"Believe it or not, I thought I'd rather get something telling me than not," said Susan, who lives with herpes and runs the herpes support group HELP in Manchester, Conn.
"But then, the first reaction was, is this for real or is this a sick joke from somebody?" said Susan, who asked that ABCNews.com not use her full name.
Opinions may vary about the e-cards, but the trend is growing, according to a study by the site's creators in the Internet Sexuality Information Services online journal.
"It's kind of like the e-vite for party notifications, but this is for STD notifications," said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner of the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
It was Klausner who approached the technology-savvy public health group I.S.I.S. Inc. in the early 2000s to help him develop the site.
"In 1999, I discovered an outbreak of syphilis related to an AOL chatroom," Klausner said. Just a year before, San Francisco had eight cases of syphilis a year. By the end of 2004, Klausner said, the city had 550 reported cases.
After tracing the outbreaks to the chatroom, Klausner and colleagues at I.S.I.S. Inc decided to use the same type of communication that facilitated the hook-ups to help resolve the situation.
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