There were a total of 1,385 unique entries for the free book giveaway ... and instead of using Excel to pick the winner, my buddy Jacco wrote me an AppleScript to do the work directly in Mail:
tell application "Mail" set myfolder to "zBook giveaway" set mycount to the count of messages of mailbox myfolder set randNum to (random number from 1 to mycount) set mysender to sender of message randNum of mailbox myfolder as text display dialog "the winner is: " & mysender set the clipboard to mysender end tellRunning this script gave me the following results:
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030707102747428