Waiting to meet for the first time her anonymous email friend, You've Got Mail's heroine Kathleen places on the café table the objects that will identify her to him – a single red rose and the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice. Kathleen's rose is more than a natural object, undisturbed by cultural connotations – it also signifies, of course, romance and passion. As Roland Barthes (Barthes 2000: 113) explains, red roses are the emblem of love and within cultures that associate roses with love it is impossible to ignore this inherent message. Kathleen's rose is also, though, a passport – a means of identification intended to facilitate her entry into a face-to-face romantic relation.

Kathleen's other identificatory object also connotes on various levels – not simply a novel she happens to be reading, nor just a means of identification, Pride and Prejudice is the quintessential love story, whose title conjoins Austen's articulation of pride and prejudice with those in Kathleen's own very modern, or perhaps postmodern, tale of love.

While You've Got Mail reprises many of the orthodox codes of the romance genre – finding, losing and re-finding love; the obstacle that thwarts, temporarily, the fulfilment of love; the transformation of antipathy or even hatred into love – it re-contextualises this familiar story situating it within a scenario of anonymous emailing often associated with internet dating and sex services. Yet, You've Got Mail normalises and romanticises internet cruising, dating and chat services, allaying the cultural anxiety arising from recent changes to courting rituals and sexual encounters, and dispelling the threat, danger and titillation allied with net-dating.