By now, several people have informed me of some spam emails from my account. Yes, unfortunately, my email account has been compromised.
Firstly, to all the people who received those emails, I am so sorry! I hope you or your email host flagged and disregarded them. Thank you to all who alerted me to the issue.
My email password was fairly strong (at least I thought so), so I don’t think it was a dictionary/brute force attack. I’m inclined to suspect a virus + keyboard capture on my home computer. Even though a full scan by McAfee didn’t reveal anything, I’m still skeptical.
Now, I’m figuring out what to do. I’ve reset my passwords on various sites, and backed up necessary data. For a couple of reasons, I will not use the Recovery Disk (too much OEM fluff, and a previous repair of the computer made it unrecognizable). I’m open to options including switching to Linux (though that may be waaaay over my head). I also need to consider if there’s anything else I can do for my email account, or if I should just switch to a new account (I’ve had that email handle for so many years, it’s hard to let go..).
Meantime, my online time will be limited until I’m satisfied as to the security of my machine. Certainly the world goes on whether I’m logged on or not 
but it does mean I will miss all the information posted in the social network cloud (such as birth/wedding/job/I’m-feeling-bored announcements over email, Facebook, LinkedIn, mySpace..) . So bear with me, and give me an update the next time you see or talk to me, please ?
