Feeling pretty murderous, here

This afternoon, some bastards hijacked the weekly KidsOutAndAbout.com email newsletter I sent out this morning, and then changed the title to something filthy and sent it out to Hotmail addresses all over the place. At the bottom, masquerading as the thing you click on to unsubscribe, is a link to porn sites. So I'm getting tons of emails ever since 6pm tonight, with recriminations for MY having sent out something like this, with stuff for kids on it.

What seems to have happened is that some kind of virus/trojan on one of my recipients' emails did this, sent the email along to somewhere in Brazil, where it was modified and sent out again to Hotmail addresses, which are probably programmed to send it along to still more. My web site hosts say that it looks like it was manually manipulated to have that title and some of the links before being re-sent out. So this probably is something deliberate, rather than just some computer reassigning a title and then sending it out. Makes it worse.

I panicked when I first started receiving the TAKE ME OFF YOUR EMAIL LIST demands. But then I realized that all of the people requesting to be taken off *weren't on my list in the first place*. This is good, because I was picturing the public humiliation here in Rochester that would arise from my sending porn out to a significant subset of my 6000 readers. Excellus would, I'm sure, have demanded the site come down instantly. But fortunately, there was no breach of our email server, and none of my readers were emailed. I literally felt sick to my stomach for a while, and couldn't eat much dinner, and here it is 1am and I still can't sleep.

Gross, totally gross. The bastards. If anything, David was more angry than I...I was mostly upset and horrified, whereas he was psychologically ready for actual violence. It's that absolute impossibility of even finding out who did this, much less punish them, that is so very frustrating.

I desperately hope this doesn't snowball through Hotmail. Having my newsletter circulating around the globe, with my email address above some disgusting contents, is really...unappetizing.

At least we're going on the cruise on Sunday.

Of course, Tropical Storm Gabrielle is currently meandering off the East Coast...here's hoping that we miss it on our way from New York to Bermuda.