Jinn, I agree wholeheartedly plain text emails are safe and you're right, I was aware. But he was referencing spam in
general and he was plain wrong when saying only attachments had to be opened to be exploited. Futhermore, how do you know a e-mail is plain text before you open it? Much less the type of protection varies from one e-mail carrier to the next. Hotmail is the most commonly exploited I believe, among a lot of generic ones.
I also forgot to mention I use both Firefox [religiously] and Thunderbird [once in a while]. And to say, if you're really curious go to you local library and use their computers.
Or, as you mentioned use a browser/e-mail client innoculate against this. I didn't recommend them b/c they're not very popular even though I like them - people are complacent w/ IE and in turn, a lot of sites render correctly w/ IE and not Firefox. As for TB, I was never an OE kind of guy, much less TB, and assume most people are preferential to what's default and recognizable to them [OE]. Sorry if I'm not all about giving people alternatives, they usually don't care or have the time to master a new application.
There was no hostility meant. Just plain anger at the status quo [not to mention every kind of *ware other than soft & hard
] and how that bit of "advice" seems to circulate and thought of as always right. It's not.