Programming problems are to blame for a deluge of emails to Harvard students from the website www.12dateme.com over the past week, and it is not the scam that some students expected.

Website users send anonymous emails to acquaintances they'd like to date, and the recipient receives instructions to go to the site and guess who sent the email. Ideally, if one guesses correctly, both participants receive an email declaring the match.

But instead of matching up couples that guess correctly and sending a matching email, the website automatically sends the same preliminary email to everyone that the user entered as a guess, thus causing the number of emails sent to rise exponentially.

And even if a user does guess his or her suitor correctly, the website neither recognizes matches nor sends out matching emails.

Brian S. Ree, a 21-year-old senior at the University of California at Berkely, created the website last month as "a little fun thing," he said in an email.

In the past week, he said, 12dateme.com has seen more than 2500 visitors per day.

"The traffic is growing substantially," Ree said. "I'm a very inexperienced programmer. This is the first website that I've actually made and put on the Internet,"

Some Harvard students thought that the site was sending out spam email to Harvard mailing lists, since the frequency of the emails was so high.