I've jst received an message from a friend warning that there is an email going around (since saturday) which begins - life is beautiful. DO NOT OPEN IT under any circumstances. Apparantly it is contains a power point presentation and once opened you will lose everything on your pc and the person who sent it will gain access to your details including password. I'm not sure how serious this is but AOL has already confirmed the severity of it. The virus has been created by a hacker who calls himself 'life owner'.... Be careful

Thanks for that :-)

Like so many of these things I'm afraid this warning you have received is a hoax   The whole purpose, actually, is to rely on lots of people emailing everyone on their mailing list to clog up the internet.  If you every see any more of this sort of thing you can always check it out on http://www.snopes.com/ before passing it on.

Seconded! These hoax email messages always have a similar pattern to them too. All of them claim that your PC hard drive will be wiped clean and your computer fatally damaged and most of them are "unfixable" by any of the anti-virus programs available. As Isabel says, the idea is to spread panic and clog up email servers so always check their validity first.

wouldnt you think people had better things to do, hey? I am very careful ever since inadvertantly downloading a virus once - I think it was the klez one - not sure what happened but it was a painthanks for letting me know.