Solution to fake giveaways - this will prove 100% that it is real

wat

Absolutely not, the site will never host gift data like that, nor will the staff have access to gifts. It opens up all sorts of liability.

some people do not like submitting gifts to a website, as they can be stolen (not going to happen here), or the website could get hacked (based on some of the clientele here... maybe) and someone gets all the gift codes. It's the same reason some people don't like putting credit card info on the web.

some website admins do not like being responsible for people's gifts if something goes wrong. Worst case scenario: database gets hacked, and hundreds of gifts get stolen. the people who gave / won those gifts get angry at the site admin

-Just my opinion, but those seem like pretty good reasons that this will never happen

EDIT: too slow :-\

This won't work if the gift is in a form of a activation key.

OR, you can just check in Manage Gifts and Guest Passes to confirm that it was activated after the email was sent.

it would work, but it opens up a whole new list of problems.

If you want that no fake giveaways happen, make people take screenshots of their gifts and guest passes tab and submit to the website and before the giveaways start they should be authorized by the admins/mods.
But that would be way too much work for the admins imo.

This could work, but if it was a activation key, it wouldn't work.

So... to make myself legit, all I had to do would be to send an empty email with 'You've received a gift' as the subject?

The machines can have my game codes when they pry them from my cold and dead hands.

Oh, yes! I imagine this would may be something like this:

RSS feed:

09.06.2011 - Breaking News: 3 million keys of Dirt 3 have been stolen!

xx.xx.201x - Breaking News: SteamGifts has been hijacked, 150 gifts stolen!

You wanna the site will act such a dangerous way?

What stops me from sending a email from my mail client with a forget URI? Nothing

What stops the gifter to then resend it to himself? Nothing

Does Cult get more headaches? Hell yeah

No.

And now I'm paranoid again...yay. :(

Fake giveaways are an issue since when? Whoever makes them usually gets banned before being able to do so again.
You can usually avoid these fake giveaways by studying the description, by looking at the gifter's profile, Steam page, etc, and then by finally reporting their giveaway.

Also if your idea is to prevent these from happening by making some automated system copy paste links to certain people then I'd say it's an overly complicated idea that could bring more chaos and disaster to this website.

The main issue on the site is currently the horde of scammers, from my point of view at least.