Yes, it's spam and it's called spoofing as mentioned. While it's not technically "dangerous" to open them, you could be asking for more spam by opening it. Often they'll put in a little code to tell if you've opened it and that verifies the email address. A verified email address is worth much more than an unverified one in the spamming world. Not unlike a known telephone number is worth more to a telemarketer. When you get this stuff, delete it, or pay the price. OJ, sometimes people will do the right thing and use BCC when they send mail to multiple people. They usually put their own address in the "To" field and "BCC" the others so addresses will be hidden. It's the right thing to do. Now that doesn't mean that it's *not* spam though! :) People who send to everyone in their address book and not BCC, and also the people who just forward hoaxes and other junk should have their computers confiscated.

I think it's set up. To make it "phony" they just wouldn't plug that extension cord into a power outlet. Unless they're suicidal, no one is foolish enough to do anything like this. I think they're fools for even posing for this photo. With our litigious society, first time some kid emulates this behavior, the two nuts in the photo could be sued to kingdom come. Rose

Oh yuck yuck yuck YUCK! Some of these are so awful! I found a rusty metal and plastic part in a Diet Coke from McDonald's once. It had fallen off of the fountain drink machine. I just brought it up and showed them, and they said "Oh, thanks". I should have swallowed it and sued. ;) I once found a rag baked into an english muffin. Found a stick in a bag of chips. Claude found staples in a hamburger from Harveys. A couple of years ago (I shouldn't admit this), the kids and I were staying in a hotel because Claude was out of town for a few days on a business trip and our house had recently been broken into and I didn't want to stay home alone..... Anyhow, we went out to A&W for supper. It was an A&W and Country Style Donuts all in one. I was eating my burger and I felt something hard on my tongue. I picked it out and it was a piece of bone or tooth or something. I was SO grossed out. I brought it up to the cash and showed the woman working. She was incredibly apologetic, and said she'd send it off to their head office to have it analyzed. She went way over the top sucking up. She refunded our meal and gave us coupons for future meals, brought Sophie for a tour of the back of the restaurant, gave the kids suckers and A&W mugs and stickers, and let Sophie fill up a box of a dozen donuts. I kept saying that all that wasn't nescessary - I just wanted to let her know. But she was very insistant, so I thought "Well hey, why not?" On our way back to the hotel, arms laden with free goodies, I noticed that a big piece of one of my teeth was missing. It had been cracked before (Ben sapped my calcium when I was pregnant, I think), and I had chipped a small piece out already. It's not even like I had chipped it on something I ate - it must have just sort of plopped off while I was eating the burger. I was SO embarrassed when I realized. I should have gone back to tell her, but I just couldn't.

Man, I WISH I had gotten 95% offers to get insulted about! LOL Most houses in my town are closing at 95% this last year, so we priced at 5% over our target price and a little more than 6% over our bottom-line price, and asking is about 6% below our closest comp. It would have been pointless to list at our base price because pretty much no one pays asking price here, it's almost a challenge to some people to see how far below asking they can get. We had two written offers at 30 and 35 DOM, one at 93% and one at 90% (bargain hunter!); we negotiated up to the 95% which was our target number, but both buyers then turned around and demanded more $ for this-that-and-the-other, bringing the price down to around 91.5% which was simply not acceptable. We know that bargain-hunter buyer was not overly serious about wanting the house, he was just trying to see how little he could get it for, and let's not talk about the other buyer. :-) When I told our new realtor about the offer history, she was gobsmacked that our current realtor had rolled over for it. We are at 75 DOM now and not stressing that we should have accepted bargain-hunter's "deal" because we could sit for several more months before we lost enough money in carrying costs to equal that extra 3.5%. Next week we are listing with our new realtor who is known to be much more aggressive than our current one - I asked her flat out if we should lower the price and she said absolutely not. I do admit that we lowballed an offer on one house at 80% of asking, but it had a LOT of problems (we estimated that it would have cost us a good 15% of the asking price to bring it all the way up to snuff, and that's not including pure cosmetics like painting over scary colors) and had been on the market for many, many months. Also, it was a bank-owned property so there weren't really anyone's feelings to hurt in the process. :-) We didn't get it and I am really, really glad we did not because I found out later it had far more serious issues than we thought it did, and it would have been the House From Hell. We're paying a little bit more than our buying agent thinks we ought to be for our new house, partially because we did not want to risk losing it to someone else while we were d***ing around countering and re-countering because we'd already had one house snatched out from under us that way, and we knew the seller wasn't going to be able to go much lower if at all anyway. It is light-years better than anything else we had seen and we weren't willing to let it get away for an amount we could come up with to add to the down payment so we could keep our monthly payment where we wanted it. Our agent was sure she could have gotten us another 1-1.5% off, but we're okay with 97.5% of asking.