I just received an email from a friend, with an attachment warning me of a dangerous email going round the Internet, and advising me not to open it, as I could wind up with my C disk trashed, and to forward this information to everyone I know! My response was: "Rubbish!!" Opening an email in itself is extremely unlikely to do such a thing, though opening an attachment might. My advice to anyone interested is this:

1. Don't open email attachments from people you don't know, or at least save them somewhere and then scan them with a good virus-checker first.
2. Copy and paste the name of the supposed virus and/or the Subject of the email you are being warned about, into an Internet search engine, such as Google. You will almost certainly get a list of websites that feature it, and they will tell you whether or not it is a hoax. Most of them are. (The one I just received was, as have been all the others that have arrived in my inbox from time to time.)
3. Tell the person who sent you the email, together with as many as you can of fellow-addressees and CC recipients, that it is a hoax, asking them NOT to forward it to all and sundry, as doing so simply generates Internet traffic exponentially, slowing it down even more than it already is!

You probably know all this already, but there are still people out there who are fooled by these hoaxes, and I'd like to think that those of us who know about them are ready to try to do something about them.