a virus that is wiping out contacts in hotmail has struck ME. No Snopes'ing necessary.

::::::::

Here is the email I just sent out to everybody on my mailing list:

"Tonight I opened my email and got a lot of inexplicable "replies" to a message I never sent, something about an electronics site. Then I noticed my "vacation" settings were on, and that the spam in my "vacation reply" box was the same spam electronics ad. Then in my "junk mail" folder, I found the same ad from somebody named "stacy" something, which I also deleted.

This had to have happened within the past three hours, when I last checked my email.

I am very sorry that somehow my account has become infected, and by proxy I've put yours at risk.

I've had this email account for about 3 years now, it's going to be a bear to change out to a new one, but there ya go.

I'm going to change over to a gmail account that I never use, but will begin to use now.

That account is "[----]". Please make a note and change my address in your address book. Please also check your email account's "vacation" or "away" messages to make sure that you aren't infected as well, and watch out for that little vermin, "Stacy".

Again I am so very sorry for spreading this electronic swine flu,
~Jen"

...so I toddled over to the hotmail "help" center, which is evidently there to permanently irritate people under duress after things have already gone terribly wrong, and there is a list of people saying "contact list disappeared", etc.

I have over 200 contacts, all over the world. There's no way in hell I can recover them all.

Oh. And. Hotmail tells me that I've "exceeded my limit" for message sending now.

If you use hotmail, go snag all of your contacts NOW, and print them out. Do not put them into a file in your computer, lest "Stacy" be lurking there.

If you use email period, do this thing, and save yourself some grief.

This is a bitch of a virus.

Good luck.

Authors Bio:
Mother of two adult children, freelance artist with fine works in private collections in 20 US states, 7 European countries, Africa, China, and Japan, concerned citizen of the US.

Overreaching corporate controls of food, housing, clothing, medicine, transportation, information, and education have been a serious concern of mine for decades. Consequently I've spent a great deal of time studying and practicing self-sufficiency/ removal from "the grid".

I no longer have credit cards, I raise my own vegetables and chickens, am an herbalist, a reiki master, a shiatsu practitioner who's worked with people with serious illnesses for more than a decade, as well as an ordained minister [I call myself a shamanist because it's the closest description of what I do, not because I'm from Tibet].

I've worked in construction for many years, and I've spent some time beating dead horses on the subject of independance from corporate control and learning to live a life of value as opposed to one of dehumanization.

My message to surburbanites: rototill your front lawn, grow vegetables, put up solar panels, stay home more often, make things for yourself, and cut up your credit cards.

Live your life as if truth, honor, and love were the most important things.

The corporate culture would have us believe that we owe someone rent for the privilege of being on the planet, that some pigs are more equal than others, that it's important to be royalty- as opposed to noble- and that happiness is available for purchase.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out the truth of things.