This was a case where scanning your attachments before running them, normally an adequate safeguard, would ve done no good, and in fact, did no good for those who tried it. There was a fire, somewhere, a few days ago. The family lost everything. The way that viruses spread by email is widely misunderstood. The email message itself cannot be infected.
People often send cute little animations or small utility programs to each other.
These programs can be infected, just like any program. The simplest way is to scan any attachment with an anti-virus program before you open it. Most anti-virus programs make this pretty easy. Since new viruses, like Melissa , can sometimes escape detection, a more foolproof method is simply to not run any emailed or downloaded program until you ve found out whether it has caused problems on other people s computers. The safest approach would employ both methods for each file, but this exceeds the patience of most computer users in the known universe.