For the first time, I received one of those nasty new viruses, the Palyh or Mankx virus. I've never gotten one of these right when it was hitting its peak. I deleted it immediately without opening the attachment.

Here's an idea: when you receive an email from anyone, if it contains an attachment, ask yourself, "Would this person normally send me an attachment?" In this case, it supposedly comes from Microsoft. "Would Microsoft really choose to send me Windows stuff through email?" No, of course not. And let's say you've got a friend or relative who regularly sends you those stupid forwarded-a-million-times files. First, do you really need to see this? And second, if you don't recognize the file extension, DON'T OPEN IT. I saw that the extension in this email was a ".pif" - which I happen to know is an alternate extension for an executable file (not everyone knows this, is what I'm saying). If I didn't know anything about it, why would I open it? This is how viruses spread, by people mindlessly opening extensions.

You should have to get a license to operate a computer. You should have to have a general knowledge of file types that run on computers, how to avoid destroying them, and how to avoid falling for them as malicious virii. It should have to be common sense to not open ".pif" files, or ".dat," or even something as obvious as ".exe" files. You should have to know, do not ever, ever, EVER just open these files. These damn things prey on people who don't know all that, prey on those who open everything they're sent. The internet is like the back-alley you don't want your kids to play in - you can find an untold amount of disturbing stuff that could hurt you out there. I hate to say it, but you should just assume that you're going to be bombarded with spam, viruses, porn, or any other lascivious subject matter, if you hang out on the internet for any significant amount of time. It's out there, but unlike the back-alley, it doesn't just wait for you to come find it. It finds you on its own.