But… from what I turned up in one minute with Google, IT IS A HOAX.

The email I received is copied below. Whether Ian del Carmen actually sent it, I dont know. Could be a fraudulent misuse of his name and email (that’s called spoofing, I believe).

Either way, if you do a Google search you can quickly see that this same wording was doing the rounds as long ago as 26 Feb 2008. That’s nearly 2 years ago.

***

While writing this post, another marketer has fallen for it and blasted out a copy of the same Ian del Carmen email that I received. I’m on his list too — that’s how I know.

How many more will fall for this?

***

Thought for the day: Before passing on well-intentioned alerts to your friends or subscribers, do a search for some of the key words in the message. It can save you having to scrape egg off your face later.

***

Here is the email:

HUGE VIRUS COMING! PLEASE READ  FORWARD!

Hi All!

I checked with Norton Anti-Virus, and they are gearing up for this virus!
I checked Snopes, and it is for real. Get this E-mail message sent around to
all your contacts ASAP.

PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG YOUR FRIENDS, FAMILY AND CONTACTS!

You should be alerted during the next few days. Do not open any message with
an attachment entitled ‘POSTCARD FROM HALLMARK,’ regardless of who sent it
to you. It is a virus which opens A POSTCARD IMAGE, which ‘burns’ the whole
hard disc C drive of your computer.

This virus will be received from someone who has your e-mail address on
his/her contact list. That is the reason why you need to send this e-mail to
all your contacts. It is better to receive this message 25 times than to
receive the virus and open it!

If you receive an email called’ POSTCARD,’ even if it is sent to you by a friend, do not open it!
Shut down your computer immediately. This is the worst virus announced by CNN.

It has been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever. This virus was discovered
by McAfee yesterday, and there is no repair yet for this kind of virus. This virus simply destroys the
Zero Sector of the Hard Disc, where the vital information is kept.

Sincerely,

Ian del Carmen
CEO, Fireball Group

http://FireballOnline.com

The new site is about how you can make more sales when you have a higher search engine ranking. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be sharing many strategies and tips as well as offering to directly assist business owners who want help to get their sites onto the first page of the search engine results.

I love the new Wordpress template I found for the site. It has a delightfully exuberant feel… just like the feeling you get when your site appears on page 1 of Google^TM.

– Written by Gary Harvey

Laying horses is where you bet AGAINST the favorite. Since favorites only win about one third of the time, it makes sense to not bet that the favorite will win — right?

Anyway Kris explains more about laying horses at his site…
Racing Secrets Exposed.com

Cheers.

This is a free service designed to monitor your RSS feed and find where your content has been republished in the blogosphere. We automatically notify you when a new post of yours is copied to another feed, we also build an overview page you can view to see how/when/where your content is being duplicated, quoted or plagiarized. This is an entirely free service and is powered by the feed spidering power of ://URLFAN.

http://www.copygator.com

By the way, there’s no connection between Copyscape and Copygator, that  I know of — apart from the obvious similarity of name.

And here’s a tip from me. Many times a marketer wont mind if his or her stuff is being reproduced elsewhere because, knowing that might happen, he’s included a link in the article — along with the unlinked domain name. That way, unauthorized content re-use still helps you.

Cheers,
Gary Harvey

While the wives were in the kitchen, the old man leaned over to his host, ‘I think it’s wonderful that, after all these years, you still call your wife all those loving pet names’. The host hung his head. ‘I have to tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘Her name slipped my mind about 10 years ago and I’m scared to death to ask the cranky old woman what it is.’

**

Thanks to Ken Leatherman for sharing this. We laughed and laughed at this. Must be getting on a bit ourselves…

Gary Harvey

I’m now using JustHost to host some of my sites, and I’m very pleased with their service.

If memory serves me here, they guarantee a response within an hour but so far they’ve outdone that every time I had a question or an issue needing their input.

I found them polite helpful and informative. Plus they’ve got everything the typical site owner is looking for.

The current discount cuts the price nearly in HALF.

CLICK HERE

* Unlimited domains
* Unlimited bandwidth (= unlimited traffic)
* Unlimited disk space
* CPanel and all the usual features.

Nice.

Best wishes,
Gary Harvey