KENNET SQUARE, Penna. – Two e-mail addresses created to allow racing fans to send get well messages to Barbaro may have to be shut down. According to Dean Richardson, the veterinarian who operated on the Kentucky Derby champion after he had fractured his right hind leg in the Preakness, more than half the e-mails sent to the Barbaro e-mail addresses are spam.
“I can’t understand why so many people think this horse needs Viagra,” laughed Mr. Richardson, who seemed to be enjoying the chance to get out of the operating theater and to spend some time in front of news cameras. “Perhaps we should have inserted a spam blocker into his leg.”
“It certainly is odd,” added Barbaro’s owner, Gretchen Jackson, wearing green courderoys, pink rugby shirt, and a Barbaro cap. “I’m amazed at the number of people willing to pay good money to get funds out of foreign countries no one has ever heard of.”
After Barbaro had survived a titanic operation at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center the day after the Preakness—twenty-seven screws were inserted into three shattered bones in his leg—someone at the center thought “it would be a hoot,” said Mr. Richardson, to add a Barbaro link to the center’s web site. Messages sent to that link would then be posted on New Bolton’s online message board.
The United States Equestrian Federation (USEF) also created an e-mail address to which fans can send messages to Barbaro. The messages will be compiled and forwarded to Barbaro’s connections.
Quicker than you could say, “Get well, Big Guy,” spammers had “harvested” the addresses. Soon offers of sexual ecstasy, painless weight reduction, debt consolidation, and even spam blockers nearly overwhelmed the e-mail servers.
“We’ve thought of switching from Microsoft Outlook to Google Gmail,” said Muffy English, events planner for the USEF. “If that doesn’t solve the problem, we’ll just have to close down the address, and people will have to get their secretaries to write a letter to Barbaro.”
In other news, three Hewlett-Packard tech support workers in Manilla were fired after their supervisors discovered that the workers were really short Americans with bogus Philippine accents.
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