No, you cannot get infected by just looking This is done for reasons related to spam, but it also increases your malware-related security. Even when displayed in a web interface like Gmail, the message is scrubbed of any scripting that could cause problems before it is displayed.Īlong the way, vulnerabilities related to email-based exploits 2 have also been getting fixed, regularly and quickly.Īdditionally, images aren’t even displayed by default by most email programs. Email is no longer treated like a webpage. The most dramatic fix is that JavaScript - and most other coding that used to allow an email message to “do something” - no longer works. Modern email programs and sites don’t do that You weren’t even there.įortunately, this didn’t last long.
Your email program “looked” at a message and your machine was infected.
If the new message contained DHTML/JavaScript malware, it was possible it would run and infect your machine. Outlook, keeping the selection at “most recent”, selected the newly arrived message 1 and updated the preview pane with its contents. You had your most recent email message displayed in the preview pane. You left your email program open with the preview pane showing. Outlook was one of the earliest and most popular. I say “Outlook,” but any email program offering what we now call a “preview pane” was vulnerable. Those vulnerabilities allowed them to infect your machine with more malware.Īll because you opened your email and looked at it. Since email could “do things” like run small programs within their display window, it didn’t take long for hackers to write malware not only taking advantage of that, but exploiting vulnerabilities those programs could reach. Since many email programs simply used the web browser to display HTML, email messages could also now do things. Now email could be as “pretty” and complex as a magazine page. In HTML email, words can be bold or underlined, we can insert images, and more. Your browser, and the HTML displayed in it, became a platform for computer programs.Įmail used to be plain-text only, and some of it still is.īut email began to be encoded using the same language as webpages: HTML. By “things,” I mean actions like turning this text red when you move your mouse over it to games you can play in your browser. It’s the way webpages are written and described so your browser can display them as the designer intended.ĭHTML, for Dynamic HTML, and JavaScript, a programming language, added something HTML didn’t have by itself: the ability to do things. #Outlook for mac bad alert corrup software
It remains important to be skeptical with links and attachments, and to keep all software as up to date as possible. This is no longer the case, and you will not get a virus from looking at an email. It used to be that email programs would automatically run programs embedded in email messages when displayed, and occasionally those could be malicious.
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