<p>I know that clicking on a link can be dangerous – viruses and so forth. But is there any danger – to either your computer’s safety or to the privacy of your e-mail address – by just opening the e-mail to see what it is? I can’t always tell from the sender or the subject line that it’s really a phishing scheme, so sometimes I open them.</p>
<p>And lately I seem to be getting more and more and more of them. Apparently several people from Nigeria have recently passed away and I’m to get a fairly substantial portion of their estate. ;)</p>
<p>Depending on your computer’s security settings, yes. For example, the e-mail could have some HTML in it that lets the sender know that you opened it… essentially telling them that this is a ‘real’ e-mail address. Spammers use such techniques to figure out which e-mail address have active readers and which don’t. Naturally those that have people opening the messages will get flooded with tons more messages.</p>
<p>I wondered about this alot too as I had been listing things on Craigslist and got those offers, “I will pay you $50 over your asking price (for a $39 item) and will send my agent to pick up and ship to me. He will give you a personal check” etc etc etc…</p>
<p>The only reason to do this we think is for the verification that an e-mail address is real…</p>
<p>With emails like these, I right-click the email message, choose ‘properties’, view this, then select ‘see message source’. Then you see the message contents without having opened the message. This works for outlook express email.</p>
<p>^^^^^ Great suggestion, Treetopleaf. Works on my AOL also. Thanks.</p>
<p>^^What Treetopleaf says.</p>
<p>My H once opened a phishing e-mail which looked like a message we’d normally get from Earthlink. DD (she was 14!) glanced at it and screamed “Daddy, did you check the message source? Don’t click on that link - it could be FAKE!”</p>
<p>never heard of this. It works on hotmail as well. Thanks!</p>
<p>Nothing quite beats the junk mails I get like the one asking you to donate money to the poor starving legless armless parentless goatless Goat boy in Baklaliviatatlaglooshen. Yes, I had to search for the name of the scam to figure out how to spell the fake county’s name.</p>
<p>^^^ Huh. What continent is that on??</p>
<p>Very Happy…where do you “right click on the message” to get to properties? Do you do this on the subject heading? I must be a dummy here…I could not find “properties” on aol.</p>