Someone posted this on a bulletin board:
So what’s the deal with those spams?
Perhaps they are just testing to see if you will open the email so they know it’s a “good” email address. Spammers often put hidden url’s in their emails that will tell them if you opened it or not. That’s why you should never open an email that looks suspicious or is from someone you don’t know.
You can open emails as long as you have your mail program set so that it doesn’t render HTML, as I do, or if you set it not to load remote images when rendering HTML.
But in no case open unexpected attachments.
If you aren’t running Windows, the vast majority of attachments won’t hurt you.
And you’re pretty much invulnerable if you use a text-mode email client (no HTML, no JavaScript, no Java, etc.).