If you use the Preview Pane in Outlook Express (that's when you can see the contents of an email in the bottom half of your Inbox window) there is a possibility that you are leaving yourself wide open to a virus attack. It all depends on a lot of 'ifs'.

IF you do not have an antivirus program running on your PC, or IF the antivirus program that you have installed  is not fully updated, a virus could be downloaded in an email onto your computer. Another 'if' is IF you are not using some method of spam filtering (MailWasher) to delete unwanted emails at source, then the moment you press the Receive All or Send & Receive button any mail addressed to you is downloaded onto your computer.

We are told that it is necessary to open an email to activate a virus, and when we receive virus warning emails they usually tell us the name the email goes by and further, they tell us we should not open the email.

But what the Preview Pane does is it actually opens the email at the top of the list, and IF you  have been unlucky enough to have downloaded a virus in an email, and IF you are unlucky enough for that email to be the one it opens automatically in the Preview Pane, you are going to wish you never used the Preview Pane.

Personally I can't see the point of it! It's no hardship to double click on an email from a trusted source to open it and see what's inside it. My advice to you is, don't use the Preview Pane!

If you are using it and after reading this you want to stop using it, but you can't remember where to do it, just open Outlook Express, click on View in the top toolbar, select Layout and take the tick out of the box that says "Show Preview Pane".