2 very easy to spot alerts that should have had you looking elsewhere when you bought that cell. Ultrafire and 5000mAh on an 18650 cell. 2 things that say don’t buy this one.
Did you take a picture of the wrong cell? That one doesn’t appear damaged…
But yes, the warnings are real and you got off easy this time. All it takes for an instance like this to turn into catastrophe is a phone call. If you hadn’t been where you could smell that warning sign, what would have happened? Had that cell been in a storage box with a dozen other cells, or 50 like in my case, things could have been gruesome. So we have to keep an eye on things and buy quality cells to begin with in an effort to prevent yet another horrid story in the media about Li-ion…