AOL Webmail

I have a webmail account with AOL. This morning on checking my email I appear to have an email from myself to myself marked No Subject.

I know you can right click and choose 'view message source' but what I want to know is, if this email carried a virus for example would clicking the 'view message source' allow the virus to be executed on my PC.

Any advice would be helpful. I know I could always delete the message and if it comes to that I will I just wondered if there was a workaround?

Thanks

RagTag said:

I have a webmail account with AOL. This morning on checking my email I appear to have an email from myself to myself marked No Subject.

I know you can right click and choose 'view message source' but what I want to know is, if this email carried a virus for example would clicking the 'view message source' allow the virus to be executed on my PC.

Any advice would be helpful. I know I could always delete the message and if it comes to that I will I just wondered if there was a workaround?

Thanks

All you'd be doing is viewing the code, so it's safe to do that.

I recommend checking your Sent Items or your Outbox for other e-mails that you did not send. If you find others, then it would be time to change your AOL e-mail password.

Thank you so much TwoCables for your reply. I went ahead and viewed the code and nothing in the message means anything to either myself or the one other person who uses my PC so I will just go ahead and delete it without opening it.
As you suggested I have checked all my messages and everything seems exactly as it should be.
We both are very careful about security but I will monitor this situation even more carefully now.

Thanks again for your response.

RagTag said:

Thank you so much TwoCables for your reply. I went ahead and viewed the code and nothing in the message means anything to either myself or the one other person who uses my PC so I will just go ahead and delete it without opening it.
As you suggested I have checked all my messages and everything seems exactly as it should be.
We both are very careful about security but I will monitor this situation even more carefully now.

Thanks again for your response.

With webmail, it doesn't matter how secure your computer is because the infiltration happens on the e-mail server and it leaves your personal computer completely unaffected. There are many people, particularly Yahoo Mail users, who have experienced having spam sent from their account to everyone in their address book and they don't find out until either one of their friends complains to them or they just happen to look in their sent items folder.

I have Comcast and it even happened to me. It involved an old account that I don't use anymore but I keep around just in case. One day I decided to log in and see if it has received any e-mails over the past couple of years, and the inbox was full of non-deliverable e-mails. It turned out that spam was sent from that account without me ever knowing about it to every person who was in that account's address book. Fortunately for me, all of those e-mail addresses in that address book no longer exist! lol A couple of those people are former co-workers who thought fairly highly of me, so I think I was lucky.

Like I said, I hadn't looked at that e-mail account in years and yet it happened anyway which proves to me that your personal computer doesn't even have to exist anymore. You could trash your computer and abandon your e-mail account without closing it or cancelling it and it could still happen because it's the e-mail server that gets hacked.

So, I was worried that this is what happened to you. To be honest, I recommend changing your e-mail password anyway because it's very strange that you have an e-mail sent to you by you that you didn't know about until you logged in.

Computers can be wonderful but like everything else in life people are the problem. I could get really angry if I allowed myself to at those who just like to sod things up for others for no good reason other than that they can. Anyway I won't go on about that.
Thank you again for your advice which I will take under serious consideration.