Scanning junk email for threats

I have received in my junk box an email that looks quite interesting from an unknown source.  How can I test it for threats?

I have received in my junk box an email that looks quite interesting from an unknown source.  How can I test it for threats?

Many thanks for your reply.

I have Norton 360 v5 and run MS Outlook 2007.

Tim

Hi timwalter,

 

Set Outlook to open messages in plain text. You can then safely open it.  If there are links to websites, don't click them.  If there are attachments, don't open them.  If you suspect the message is spam or a phishing attempt you can Google the subject line to see if there are any reports about this particular email.  You can check Norton Safe Web for the site ratings of any links you find.

You could save an attachment to disk and run a custom file scan on it, but I wouldn't recommend doing this - any attachment in an unsolicited email from a sender you don't know is almost certain to be malicious, so just don't mess with it.  In fact, once you have opened the message in plain text and read it you should delete it without going any further,  Even checking out the links and scanning the attachments cannot guarantee that they are 100% safe, and in any message from an unrecognized sender there is a very good chance that they are, in fact, malicious.

Adding to SendOfJive's post when you download the messages with Outlook, Norton will scan the incoming mails during the download, and remove any attached threats, or mark it as a Spam if it contains any spam like item in it. In the second case it will be also moved to the Spam folder.