Major virus warning - real or hoax?

A friend sent the following message to me today. I'm always suspicious of virus warnings that ask me to forward them to everybody I know, because that's what the bad guy wants, to have everybody warn everybody and thereby clog up the Internet. I'm also suspicious of warnings that claim to have been checked out with snopes.com and include a link to that site, the link itself being phony and infected. I checked with snopes.com on my own, entering "Mail Server Report" in the search window. The warning turns out to be true. But the way they word it is odd. It sounds as though the warning is true but that it contains a poison pill. So what do you make of this?

Subject: MAJOR VIRUS WARNING

Check with Snopes.com at the end. It is real. Anyone using Internet mail such as Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and so on.

This information arrived this morning, Direct from both Microsoft and Norton. Please send it to everybody you know who has access to the Internet.

You may receive an apparently harmless e-mail titled 'Mail Server Report' If you open either file, a message will appear on your screen saying: 'It is too late now, your life is no longer beautiful.' Subsequently you will LOSE EVERYTHING IN YOUR PC, And the person who sent it to you will gain access to your name, e-mail and password.

This is a new virus which started to circulate on Saturday afternoon.
AOL has already confirmed the severity, and the anti-virus softwares are not capable of destroying it.

The virus has been created by a hacker who calls himself 'life owner'.

PLEASE SEND A COPY OF THIS E-MAIL TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS, and ask them to PASS IT ON IMMEDIATELY!

THIS HAS BEEN CONFIRMED BY SNOPES

http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/mailserver.asp