While I cannot speak for the poster above who said that email alone cannot hurt you, they are semantically correct -- Plain Text EMails cannot harm your computer.
I understand that you may have read about exploits in Outlook or Internet Explorer, but I must say again; plaintext emails cannot have executable code contained within, and can therefore NOT harm your computer in any way-shape-or-form.
In the same way that reading my post cannot harm your computer in any way, neither can reading plaintext email. The "exploits" you're talking about are because Microsoft chooses to allow certain emails to imbed HTML and executable content, not because email is inherently insecure. By shoehorning "web" features into an email client like Outlook, Microsoft allows for the possibility of imbedded (and likely malicious) executable code. If you were, for example, to view the email in a viewer like Thunderbird (
http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/) or a web-viewer with HTML disabled, such as Gmail (
www.gmail.com), you would find that these "exploits" were nonexistant.
You may even have known what I just said, but chose to omit it from your post. I think it's far more friendly to provide a workaround solution than to chastise someone for doing something, and warning them not to do it in the future. In this case, you can open any damn email you want as long as you use a non-"dynamic" viewer.. one that does not support imbedding or HTML formatting instructions. If you're going to get in a huff and warn everyone about the latest "WARNING WARNING VIRUS" news release you read, you might want to educate yourself and others on the TRUE ramifications before
crying wolf.