Email viruses question. When does the virus in the email actually affect your PC? Is it when you ope

In other words, can you view the email in your preview pane and not have it effect your PC? Or do the viruses affect your PC when they enter your inbox? I understand most email has virus scan and so on, I just like to know the fine details.

Email viruses question. When does the virus in the email actually affect your PC? Is it when you open it?downloads

Email virus comes in an attachment.

This is how it affects the computer. You might have a picture of a celebrity attached to your email. You would definitely like to download this image. The file name might be britneyspears.jpg but it actually is britneyspears.jpg.exe. The actual file extension is EXE which means it is an executable file and it might have an icon of JPEG file. When you double click to open this file, your computer gets infected by it.

To make sure your computer never gets affected, make sure you have Anti Virus on your computer. Whenever you download a file, and if you have norton anti virus installed then click right mouse button on that file and select Scan with Norton AntiVirus.

But here is the trick, a clever programmer may write a virus that the AntiVirus installed on your computer may not be able to detect it as Virus. So always make sure that you check the file extention before opening the file.

To view the file extention of the files, on windows XP you can do the following: