April Fools take spam seriously

Ever wondered what would happen if you replied to that Nigerian prince who needed help to transfer his hard-earned AIG bonus? GMail is now offering to do it for you, so you can focus on earning your bonus.

Google just announced the Autopilot feature, available for both email and instant messaging. The Autopilot will respond to any email or instant message for you!

And this is not your standard auto-respond feature, delivering the same message to everybody. The text produced will be relevant to the context of the message it is responding to, like with Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program (which could give you a free shrink session -- check it out here if you have no idea what I'm talking about). Also, one crucial feature of Autopilot is that it will try to emulate your communication style:

You can adjust tone, typo propensity, and preferred punctuation from the Autopilot tab under Settings. (source: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html)

Too bad it's too good to be true!