Thumb-twiddling Led Zeppelin fans do the limbo and wait for possible notification

There's a lottery going on. More than a million entered. Upwards of 18,000 will win.

This makes for the odds of winning a little better than in most lotteries.

But it's a little unnerving to consider that winners will simply be notified somehow of their win, rather than being provided a method that would allow them to verify independently that they have won. Because in this lottery, it's not like you can check your numbers against some published winning numbers. It's not a raffle.

I'm speaking, of course, about the drawing for tickets at the upcoming Led Zeppelin reunion concert. Registration closed at noon today in London time, and an announcement now places the number of successful registrants in the past week at over 1 million.

Of these registrants, 982,000 will not hear anything official about the show at all. The others, that vast minority, will hear from a third-party vendor by e-mail between today and the end of the month.

For one thing, it would be nice to know exactly what to be watching for. Will I be able to recognize it if I see it? From what e-mail address will this be sent? What will the subject line say?

Like many Internet users, I have a spam filter in my e-mail account that sends anything suspicious to a folder where I can retrieve it. I check this folder quite often, usually sentencing all of its contents to Internet oblivion.

It is quite a scary thought to realize that I might accidentally blow my one and only chance ever to see Led Zeppelin in concert during my lifetime by glossing over it when I delete bulk collections of offers for Rolex watches and cheap medication.

Also, I'd really like to know the name of the third-party vendor that will be contacting fans. What is the process I will be instructed to complete? Will I be told to visit a certain Web site to purchase my tickets, and if so, what is it?

The reason this is important is fraud. My e-mail address is out there already, and plenty of people would correctly assume I've registered my name and e-mail address in this lottery. So, if I receive an offer telling me to go to some Web site and enter my credit card information to buy the tickets, how would I be assured that the e-mail I'm receiving is legitimate? Might it really be somebody who's just trying to rip me off?

Not only is it time for more than a million Led Zeppelin fans to twiddle their thumbs. It's also time for the organizers to get serious about this reunion. Give us a hint as to what to expect so that we can be assured we've been notified of our win.

In the event that further instructions aren't publicized ahead of time, I beseech you fans to let me know -- by e-mail at ledzeppelinhistory-owner [at] yahoogroups [dot] com -- what kinds of instructions you're receiving over the remaining 11 days of this month. Please describe your notification e-mails in great detail or, if you don't mind, forward the actual correspondence. Anything received here, unless marked confidential, will be shared with the rest of the world.