The "Good Times" virus is a hoax that I first heard of a year or so ago and gets passed around every so often. It had some pretty knowledgable people fooled.

Infecting a system by reading an Email message is virtually impossible. Email is just data passing through the system to the screen or to disk. It is not executeable and cannot access any other files. I've asked experts at Microsoft and at Digital Equipment Corporation to explain how Email can infect a system. Nobody can think of a way. If there is an expert here that can explain it please do.

There is a write-up on "Good Times" somewhere on the net. Try archie or gopher to find it.