A funny thing happened the other day. I belong to a mailing list of creative professionals, and, for the first time in several months, I posted a question to the list. Later that day, I received a message from a company called 0(zero)Spam saying that "my" message couldn't be delivered to a person whom I never heard of before.

Obviously, this person has broken one of the cardinal sins of belonging to a mailing list: letting some automated system handle his mail. This usually takes the form of a autoresponder - "I'm on vacation now" which are banned from any kind of mailing list due to recursion problems.

This message, however, said that they "couldn't" deliver my email to "joe blow" because my email address wasn't "confirmed" or some such thing.

I was then prompted to click on a URL with a code number attached to it. In order to get it out of the way, I clicked on it, thinking that would have been the end of it. Instead, it took me to ANOTHER web page which prompted me to read a series of numbers printed in fancy fonts designed to thwart automated reading and type in the numbers as I saw them.

This was all over an email to someone WHO I DON'T KNOW.

After the nagging doubt went away as to what I just did, it took me about 2 minutes to come up with:

FDA investigators recently purchased three commonly prescribed drugs from a Web site advertising "Canadian Generics," which had been sending "spam" emails promoting its products. The products purchased were so-called "generic" versions of Viagra, Lipitor, and Ambien. None of the three products has a U.S.-approved generic version, and so all three drugs were unapproved.