We are not alone!!! I got it too and at both my email addresses. I had changed my email to my netscape one because I like the netscape email better than hotmail. So that means the addresses have been harvested for some time!! I am not really put off by this either. It is not often you get mail regarding an interest. Some of its looks interesting to me but my cash resources will not be spent on botanical literature since most of what I need I just print off the net since it is for my own reference. I much rather buy plants instead. Too bad they were not offerring unique Chinese ferns etc. for sale and distributed like the way Wistuba carns are distributed in the USA!! Now that might be interesting!!

well I had to try it even though I never use my yahoo email, I had no problem at all, I added a new contact by hitting the gold save button, closed it opened it, fine. I then went back to contacts hit the gold edit button and changed the spelling, saved, fine. I even did the delete using the little trash can icon. every thing I tried worked fine. Does this only happen with one contact or with any that you try to alter? when you did your edit or save did it show a new little box in your window showing the spinning icon showing that it was doing something then show it corrected?

Yes, it's spam and it's called spoofing as mentioned. While it's not technically "dangerous" to open them, you could be asking for more spam by opening it. Often they'll put in a little code to tell if you've opened it and that verifies the email address. A verified email address is worth much more than an unverified one in the spamming world. Not unlike a known telephone number is worth more to a telemarketer. When you get this stuff, delete it, or pay the price. OJ, sometimes people will do the right thing and use BCC when they send mail to multiple people. They usually put their own address in the "To" field and "BCC" the others so addresses will be hidden. It's the right thing to do. Now that doesn't mean that it's *not* spam though! :) People who send to everyone in their address book and not BCC, and also the people who just forward hoaxes and other junk should have their computers confiscated.

I think some of you are overstating the case. As I understand it, it's a software driven context review for ad placement and nothing more. It's the same as Google or any other search engine does when you do a search (look how the ads magically bear some connection to your search term and your location). It's what Gardenweb does when you're reading forums, the pages show ads triggered off of key words. You can't stop the machine analysis but if you don't like the ads, tack an ad-blocker on your browser. There's no geek with thick glasses reading your nasty email to your sister. There may be other things in the world invading your privacy but I don't think this is anything to worry about.