Any risk to opening spam?

pineapple

Maybe I'm ultra cautious but I never even open spam. You know - those notifications about tax refunds, bank security warnings, offers of meds or ways to enlarge parts of ones anatomy :rotfl:. Plus if it purports to be from a friend but I have the slightest doubt, I check with the friend first.
But I'm sometimes tempted to open them for a chuckle so my questions are:
1) Can you get a virus or malware purely from opening the mail? Ie
without clicking on an attachment or anything dodgy in the message.
2) Can these low lifes tell whether you have opened it - thereby
confirming that your email addy is alive and active and perhaps that
you are a target worth pursuing? I ask because I know you can
get software to check whether your email has been read.
Cheers

aerostar

Of course the is a risk !!!

Opening an e-mail that has html coding can inform the sender that your e-mail is LIVE.

Also if it has a real reply to address and you have NOT turned off your read receipts then they know it is live.

Golden Rule........Just do not open

If your computer is not uptodate with patches and some of the programs eg pdf program, you can get malware quite easily, even of normal websites that host adverts from 3rd parties.

3 golden rules

don't
don't
don't

InsideInsurance

1) Almost never, though loopholes have existed in email applications (Outlook, Mail, Thunderbird etc) that have been exploited to allow hackers/ spammers to run malicious code without taking action - havent been any high profile ones in recent years

2) Yes, many spam emails contain code that does confirm when its been read back to the spammer to enable them to better target live and monitored email accounts.

Mr_Toad

This post has got me thinking. When I read it my first thought was that I don't get those sort of emails any more and haven't for a long time now.

My ISP is BT and while I do have a spam filter in Outlook all it does is move spam to the junk mail folder where every so often I make sure there's nothing I need before deleting the rest.

Even so I'm still not getting any of the type listed, in fact most of my spam is from companies I have dealt with.

There are currently 124 in my junk email folder, all of them from people like Amazon, Cheap flights, confused.com, ebyer, MightyDeals, Odeon, play.com and TomTom.

I assume that most of those referred to by the OP get removed at the ISP level and I doubt BT is the only one to do it.

I know Hotmail used to have a terrible reputation but I thought even they'd cleaned up their act these days.

david39

I have a Hotmail account which I use solely to contact commercial companies and I can confirm that depite this, and the fact that I have had the account for at least three years now, I do not get the type of random spam emails to which the OP refers.

Geoffo_M

david39 wrote: »

I have a Hotmail account which I use solely to contact commercial companies and I can confirm that depite this, and the fact that I have had the account for at least three years now, I do not get the type of random spam emails to which the OP refers.

Well I still do, I've had a yahoo account for years & receive loads of this type of junk every day

pineapple

In my yahoo mail I get about 3 a day. I have never opened any though. Haven't had hotmail for years but it used to be terrible in those days.
I now have an email addy I use solely for corresponding with friends - no spam there so far. Though I suppose if their address book got hacked I could end up with some .
Plus I have started using trashmail for certain contacts.