BleepingComputer.com: Am I at risk checking properties of an e-mail?

I recently had an e-mail that was supposedly returned from Mailer Daemon. Since I didn't recall sending out an e-mail that day, I right clicked the Properties/Details/Message source and found out it was an e-mail that I had sent out 2 days earlier, but had misspelled the correct e-mail address. I don't know why it took 2 days to be returned, but it got me thinking about the practice of using properties to find out information about an e-mail that might be questionable.

My question is if I get an e-mail with a virus and I right click on Properties/Details/Message Source am I actually opening it and therefore vulnerable or is this a safe practice?

Sorry if this seems like a dumb question, but I'm not very computer literate.

Thanks in advance,

Mary

This post has been edited by gaelic123: 03 August 2004 - 12:39 AM

Hitting properties first is not opening the email in effect if it does have a virus will not effect you in any way unlesss you open it. But sometimes it is hard totell who itis really from. Some people are good at really hiding where it came from like spoffing an email adress!

As brunt said, checking the properties will not hurt. The reason it takes two days is that most mail servers are very persistent and will try very hard to deliver that mail. Some of the coding humor is evident in server mail logs.:

"Hi. This is the qmail-send program at <some.domain>.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out."

Checking properties merely displays the complete header information; reading the header will not infect your computer.
Cheers,
John

Thanks to all of you for your advice.

Mary