A In my view, vendors of antivirus products are partly responsible for the spread of virus hoaxes such as "Join the crew". Their advertising campaigns -- with their dark, menacing shadows and demonic cartoon characters chomping their way through hard disks -- are clearly intended to frighten rather than inform. Creators of hoaxes such as "Join the crew" exploit the resulting paranoia to flood the world's mail servers with megabytes of junk mail -- all without writing a single line of malicious code!
As Derek suggests, because e-mail messages are composed entirely of text, they cannot transmit viruses. File attachments are a different matter, but there's no way to catch a virus simply by opening an e-mail message.
"Join the crew" has been doing the rounds for a while now. Another one to watch for is the Good Times "virus", which -- according to its author -- is possessed of awesome destructive power: "If [your] computer contains a hard drive, that will most likely be destroyed." Destroyed?! Better have a fire extinguisher ready. But read on -- it gets worse: "If the program is not stopped, the computer's processor will be placed in an nth-complexity infinite binary loop -- which can severely damage the processor if left running that way too long." This is utterly meaningless, but it sounds scary as hell, doesn't it? Don't be fooled!
For an up-to-date list of virus hoaxes, check out http://www.mcafee.com/support/hoax.asp.
- Neville Clarkson