I am very happy to report that your fears are completely unfounded. I personally oversaw this effort. This is a legitimate outreach to our most active forum contributors. We SOLD NO INFO TO ANYONE!!!! Come on! Are we really that bad? You should know iboats by now. We care about our customers and forums members!
Here is how we did it: We chose the 500, 3000 and 6000 most active forums members in the last 6 months and sent that email to them. We used a service called Constant Contact to send the emails. They changed the URL for tracking purposes so we can see how many ended up opening the email and clicking over. There were no virus's associated with that link. sorry.
Why did iboats do this? We are the undisputed king of the boating community because of all of you. We need to stay that way. We can't ignore the other social media sites out there so we are also reaching out to the millions of boaters there. We hope that they will like us and come join all of you here in the forums and the other great places we are working to create for you all that will be launched in the upcoming weeks and months. Just call it progress. You have my sincere apology for doing something that caused you concern. As a peace offering here is an iboats discount code for free shipping at iboats for most things over $95 this next week: SHIP4FREE Hey, we are a store after all. Can't blame me for taking an opportunity at some shameless self promotion.

Have a great weekend.