Recently, I received an email from a "bidder" on one of my auctions that had "Ebay Auction" in the subject line, and contained the following message:

"Hi,
I have a couple questions before I bid.

1) Is this the only item you have sold on Ebay?
2) Can I make payment with a credit card?
3) Do you have any others?

Thanks!"

Normally, I'm one to get a response right out to a potential buyer. I figure that the more information a person has, the more likely he or she is to bid on it. But this email struck me a little funny.

First, it was titled "Ebay Auction" with no auction number or item referenced. Secondly, the email wasn't addressed to me. It was addressed to "None". That was more than enough to get my antenna up.

After determining that the sender was not a registered eBay user, I decided to investigate further. I used a free email account that I don't use for receiving primary email and wrote a note to the sender. I simply asked him if his email was a legitimate inquiry or an attempt to harvest email addresses. The sender had used a free email service, so I sent a copy of my email to his email provider.

The sender never got back to me, but the email provider responded with the following note:

"Hi!
Thanks for reporting spam. It is our policy to immediately remove any accounts which are in violation of our Terms of Service, and in compliancewith that policy, we have removed this account for its involvement with spam distribution. If you have further questions or comments, please let me know."

The lesson: If you receive a suspicious email, look up the user's email address on eBay. (In my case, it was an invalid ID). If you're not sure but don't want to seem unresponsive, use a secondary email account, such as a Yahoo! or Hotmail, and respond with the question, "which auction were you interested in?" You're either going to start a dialogue or you'll get no response (more likely).

Spammers and email-harvesters have all kinds of tricks up their sleeves. So be aware before hitting the "reply" button.