On July 27, 2004, a friend invited Guru Raj to create a Google e-mail account. A recent graduate of the University of Virginia, Raj, then twenty-one, was watching the Democratic National Convention on a television in his parents’ basement, in Norcross, Georgia. The beta version of Gmail—available by invitation only—was less than four months old at the time, and largely unproved, but Raj’s U.V.A. e-mail account was set to expire in a few weeks, so he decided to give Gmail a try.

At first, Raj tried to create an address using his own name, but, remarkably, both gururaj@gmail.com and rajguru@gmail.com were already taken. So he tried the name of the young senator from Illinois who was giving the Democratic keynote address on TV. To his surprise, it worked, and, moments later, barackobama@gmail.com was quietly born. “I’m not some cute little Indian boy who grew up in America with political aspirations,” Raj, the first in his family to be born an American citizen, said recently. “I just thought it would be kind of funny to create an e-mail address based on a random senator whose name no one could spell.”

Over the next four years, as Gmail became the third most popular Webmail provider in the U.S. and Obama became a serious contender for the next President of the United States, Raj used the account for his personal e-mail. In the fall of 2006, he received, for the first time, a message intended for the Senator. By February, 2007, when Obama formally announced his candidacy, Raj was daily receiving dozens of misdirected notes from all over the world.

The letters expressed a range of sentiments: simple incredulity (“R U REAL?”), electoral reassurance (“Don’t worry about California, they’re old fogies anyway”), mystical backing (“You represent the spirit of the Lotus sutra”), conspiratorial opposition (“Obama might not be a U.S. citizen and not qualified to run for president”), niggling criticism (“You were losing your OOMPH delivering your speeches in Texas and Ohio”), sound advice (“Don’t lose your humility”). Raj’s favorite e-mail was a nursery rhyme that went, “Hillery Dillery Dock / Obama will clean her clock / Monica’s a sin / Bu Ba fell in / Now she’s gotta deal with Barack.”

Other correspondents were more practical-minded—one extended an invitation to a Seder in Hyde Park (“We heard you were shooting a movie at the synagogue by our place”), while another expressed regrets (“I can’t make the meeting tomorrow, but I’d like to buy a shirt—preferably a medium”). At 11:14 P.M. on May 30th, a real-estate agent from Manhattan sent the following note to barackobama@gmail.com, as well as to barackobama@hotmail.com and barackobama@yahoo.com: “Mr. Obama, good luck in the rest of the election year. Please let me know if you have any real estate needs.”

Raj, who now works for a software consulting company in Washington, D.C., never replied to these, or to any other e-mails meant for Obama, not even to tell an excited would-be pen pal that he is not, in fact, the Democrats’ presumptive Presidential nominee. “It just became an interesting portal into Americana,” he said. “From the beginning, I had no intention of manipulating anyone.”

Still, the experiment has recently begun to overwhelm him. On June 12th, barackobama@gmail.com started receiving much more spam. Raj suspects that an international political Web site posted his Gmail address, “because suddenly I was inundated.” (He now receives some sixty e-mails a day addressing the Senator, most of them in foreign languages, especially Russian.) It was becoming impossible for him to separate his own electronic life from Obama’s, so last fall Raj began using a backup account. This new Gmail address incorporates his first name, his last name, and—the linchpin—his middle initial. All of “Barry’s messages,” and those few which Raj himself still gets at barackobama@gmail.com, are diverted to a spam folder in the new account. “I check it every once in a while,” Raj said, “to see if Obama’s got any interesting mail.” ♦