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I had my suspicions about this e-mail.   There were a few things that just didn't look right.  The first thing I noticed was the subject line of the e-mail  "ebaY Contest".  Well, I've never seen the name eBay appear as "ebaY" in text other than their graphical logo, all other references to the company are always "eBay".  Then there was the first line of text in the e-mail right under their logo "Ebay Contest: You could win..."  what? a capital "E" on eBay?  I'll give the intern perhaps one typo but not two in the same document.  We start this announcement with "You could win this hot Ford Explorer Tdi".  This "hot" Ford Explorer?  Is the truck stolen, perhaps she just runs a little warm?  But hey! It is the Tdi model!  What the heck is a Tdi, I bet Ford can't answer that one, but go talk to Land Rover and they can tell you all about their Tdi line.   Next, under the nice picture of the "hot" Ford Explorer we have the line "All you have to do is to login to 'My Ebay' and confirm your entrance." Wow, what a line, I'll just hit on a few quick points:
  • "... have to do is to login to..." ... Too many "to"s don't you think? At least its not two too many.
  • "Ebay" again, the 'e' is capitalized
  • login :  eBay doesn't use "login" they use "sign in"
  • "... and confirm your entrance."  My "entrance"? This probably could have been worded better.

The next line goes on to say "After that you will get a Unique Contest Key that will represent you in the draw".  Well, first we have a "Unique Contest Key", it must be a rather important key to justify all those capital letters.  So, the "Unique Contest Key" is going to represent me in the draw.  Hmmm, I'm not sure I even want to touch that line.  I'll let you look up the sixteen plus definitions of the word draw at Merriam-Webster Online.  Last, we find the small print at the bottom of the e-mail with the capitalized "Ebay".   

Update:  A special thank you to Mike and Brent who e-mailed me and let me know that the picture isn't even of a Ford Explorer but a Ford Expedition!  Thanks guys.
So, with all the nit-picking out of the way lets look into the soul of this e-mail.  You'll notice at the top of the e-mail the title bar says "Message (HTML)", ah, no wonder we have such a pretty e-mail message, its just like a web page.  Well, if you 'right-click' on a web page you get a pop-up menu that gives you the option to "view source".  Looking at the HTML source of this e-mail we can see what is really taking place.

Well, I'm feeling better now, it appears that most of the graphics for the logo and the borders are all coming from eBay.  I'm sorry I was so hard on the fat fingered intern who sent the e-mail.  Let's keep digging into the HTML source. But wait, did I miss something near the top?
If you follow the line after "141.66/ebay/" you will notice that is one continuous line of text that eventually leads us to "ford.jpg".  So what this means is the big long line of babble is the directory name that the file "ford.jpg" is stored in.  It all looks impressive if we were perhaps logging into a secure site, but then where is the "https:"?  Quite a lot of work just to get to a picture of our "hot" truck.
What happened to our ebay.com/aw/pics/ reference? It's been replaced with an IP address.  Could this be the IP address to the top secret "Tdi" division of the Ford Motor Company?  We'll look into this a bit later.

Ah, here we see the famous IP address again, but this time it is on the same line as the "Sign In..." hyperlink.  So, by clicking on the "Sign In..." hyperlink in the contest e-mail we are directed to the IP address and the 'big long babble of text' directory.  I think we better look into this IP address and see if perhaps it is the top secret Tdi division of Ford!