Your IT Consultant

Myth Buster: Not Safe to Preview Email

May 13, 2019

Almost 20 years ago, the sage advice was not to enable an email preview pane in your email client. Merely previewing an email could infect your machine. That advice is no longer valid. How-To Geek has a post that runs through some of the history and reasons why it is safe to preview an email message. In the early days of HTML email, previewing the message could be a problem. The bad guys were using HTML email, typically by using JavaScript, to automatically execute code delivering some sort of malware (e.g. Trojan, virus, worm, etc.). It didn’t take long for the providers of email clients (Microsoft, Pegasus, Eudora, and Apple) to stop allowing code to be executed when an email was opened.

As How-To Geek points out, “So, unless you’re using a very, very old, unpatched email client (think Outlook Express circa 2000 on a Windows 98 machine) your mail program simply won’t allow code to execute when you open an email.” The real danger is opening an attachment or clicking on a link. Don’t do it.

Email:   Phone: 703.359.0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsimek
https://amazon.com/author/johnsimek
https://senseient.com