The subject line of this message read 'I think they're serious.' No—I'm serious: if you were one of the many mouth-breathers who dropped this deuce into my inbox, please stick your head in a microwave and give yourself a tan.

For your enlightenment, let us look at the myriad of reasons that this warning must be a hoax.

1. Even if we ignore its questionable ethics and look solely at its aesthetic surface, the message is highly unprofessional because it is rife with grammatical errors and misspelled words. Frankly, if you think that any so-called "professional" would attempt to pass off this blight on the English language as a completed work, you need a swift smack in the skull with a scythe. Microsoft isn't purposefully misspelling words in its correspondence in homage to the street smartz of its preteen wannabe-ghetto user age bracket.

2: To expand upon the aforementioned ethics: so, hypothetically, a Hotmail staffer composed this message (complete with "small encoded program," to be discussed in detail below) and somehow arrived at the moronic conclusion that the best way to spread it among MSN's masses was as a forward. Being so selective would be detrimental to Hotmail in the following ways:

A) More bandwidth would be used by duplicate copies of this message than if Hotmail merely performed a mass-mail action on their entire user database.
B) How fair would it be to close without warning the accounts of users who did not read the message within twenty-four hours of receiving it, did not receive it at all, or did not know of fifteen other Hotmail users to whom to pass along the message? Does that not scream to you, 'potential for lawsuits'?

3: It is not possible to "encode a program" into a plain text e-mail. A program can be included in an e-mail only as an attachment, which users must opt to open. Let me give you a priceless little piece of advice right now: unsolicited programs from unknown users are most likely viruses. A user should never open such a program unless he or she first scans it for viruses and knows what effect to the computer its execution will have.

Nor is it possible to "encode a program" into an HTML e-mail. Material such as pictures or videos may be embedded, but a user's computer must have installed software capable of opening such material for it to be displayed within the e-mail message. For example, if I send you a Flash animation file and your computer lacks a Flash player, guess what you don't see? Ha ha! Guess what your would computer would need to run a "small program that [would] locate and debug your Hotmail account when sent to fifteen other Hotmail users?" It would need a program that could open an executable file without user input, which, for the uninformed, would be a massive security risk! If by chance you had such a program (none of which I know to exist) installed on your computer, then only the devil knows what the hell else you've unwittingly got running on that machine!

This is nothing but a chain letter that any twit could make in five seconds using Windows Paint and a Hotmail graphic template. Below is proof.

You want an active threat? The next person to send me one of these STUPID, BOGUS warning messages WILL have their e-mail account bombed by massive amounts of junk mail and porn, because I will sign it up to every porn list, every daily joke, every daily prayer, every newsletter I come across.

The end. Now SCREW. OFF!

- Emily