From the Museum of Hoaxes:
The Viagra Oyster Email Hoax
George May had a clever idea: Let oysters soak in a solution of Viagra for a while, and then sell them as Viagra Oysters. Of course, Pfizer is objecting to this use of its drug, and food-safety officials don’t like the idea of selling purposefully contaminated oysters. But still, May is confident he’s got a successful product on his hands, and his idea has received quite a lot of media attention. So it pleased him, but didn’t surprise him, when he received the following email from Google’s corporate offices:
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“Congratulations! The Viagra oyster story is the fastest growing internet story since 9/11 with over 700,000 links in 24 hours.”
Except, of course, Google doesn’t send out congratulatory letters of this kind. If they did, they’d constantly be congratulating whoever was the latest internet-celebrity-of-the-day. The email was the work of a prankster who forged the “from” field. Or was it? Perhaps May cooked up the email himself to gain a little more media attention for himself. He’s denying this allegation, but it seems plausible to me since he’s the one benefitting from the hoax — and because his first reaction on receiving the email was to call the media and tell them about it.