Trends Email From Bill Gates And A Lesson In Spam Email By David Cawley | 2 minute read This morning I checked an old Hotmail account and I was surprised to see an e-mail from Bill Gates. The From header was “Bill Gates (billgates_2008lottery@yahoo.fr)” which was a little surprising. I would have thought that Bill would be sending it from a Microsoft or at least a Hotmail address and not a competitor such as Yahoo. I put that thought at the back of my mind since I was excited to see why he was e-mailing me. Here’s the message I received: The content of the message was in French. I put this down to the fact that Microsoft is based in Redmond, Washington which borders us here in Canada and perhaps some French Canadian influence had started to spread across the border in the USA? After reading the e-mail, I discovered I was a winner of the “BILL GATES FOUNDATION LOTTERY FOR INTERNET EXPANSION IN AFRICA”. I realized this was quite a big deal since capitalization was used in the name! All I have to do is contact Claude Verges at the “law firm” and provide my name, address, phone, fax, e-mail and a copy of my national identity card or passport. All of which would be very useful for identity theft so I think I’ll pass on this occasions. Sorry Bill!