Norton Internet Security cannot scan emails the use SSL. How do I insure that I do not get a virus or malware by opening an email in Thunderbird?

Question

Norton Internet Security cannot scan emails the use SSL. How do I insure that I do not get a virus or malware by opening an email in Thunderbird? I have read that you don't have to click on a link to get malware but that some email can trigger malware just by opening and reading. Any suggestions to keep my emails from triggering malware? AOL Desktop software has it's own built-in email scanner but I'm trying to get away from using their software and rely just on TB.
Thanks

Answer 1

There are many aspects to this question.
First, using SSL or TLS to send and receive email is important because it prevents others from sniffing your email login. Particularly if you are using a device over wi-fi or on untrusted networks, this is critical because if others obtain your email login, bad things can happen.
Of course, using SSL or TLS with your mail server also protects the content of your email from being captured by others, so that's good too.
Second, you are correct that there can be security threats in email other than the attachments, although the attachments generally are the most dangerous. Your antivirus should protect you from bad attachments because in order to open them, they need to be written to disk in a temporary folder, and your AV software leaps into action whenever a new file is added to disk. You also can hedge your bets by using a two-step approach: first save the attachment to disk and only after it survives the real-time AV scan then launch it in the appropriate application.
Sometimes content in the message body can trigger a vulnerability in your email software or a plugin. As these vulnerabilities become known, Mozilla updates its software, but there seem to always be new issues discovered and there will never be perfect security. I'm not sure how helpful email scanning is for this problem.