The profile of a person on POF remains on the site for a period of three months. After that, it is automatically deleted.
How many people are on POF?
In an attempt to answer this question (and the next) I looked at myself from two different perspectives: First, how many people do I think see my profiles? Second, what percentage of those who view my profiles actually message me? Looking back historically (keeping in mind that we may have shut down or blocked any number of bots over time), these numbers work out at around 65% – 70% who see your profile message you, and ~10% of those who see it actually reply. I say “~” because I have no idea how many are setting up auto-responders – or if anyone does that anymore – so the real number for those responding could be as low as 5%.
It’s a common misconception that when you hide your profile on Plenty of Fish, the site stops sending out emails notifying the receipt of messages and wink requests. This is simply not true. As long as your profile is set to receive Private Messages from non-friends you are receiving these notifications. The only difference is that they’re hidden from everyone except yourself.
This is the most popular method of communication between members because you can send unlimited emails for free. However, when your profile is set to receive Private Messages from friends only, your emails will be limited to a certain number per day depending on your membership level.
The only way someone else would know that you’re hiding your profile is if they’re actually messaging you with an email address or device not associated with their Plenty of Fish account which would make them a bot…. and they’d have to get very lucky and open the email themselves before it got filtered as spam. It’s highly unlikely anyone will ever even know what happened (let alone care).
