I opened a piece of mail the other day. Normally I never do like that. This one was clever in its title. Anyway I opened it and it just said "Safari cant open URL....
I think I shouldn't have opened it. What can I run to see if I have a V or malware....?
Well, first, if this sort of thing makes you paranoid, you can just turn off the setting that allows Mail to automatically load links in incoming e-mail:
In Mail...
In the Mail menu, choose Preferences
Choose the Viewing tab
UNCHECK "Load Remote Content In Messages."
From now on, you will have to click on any URL's in incoming e-mail messages for them to load. It won't happen automatically. So you can open any e-mail that you like with complete abandon.
Now...to the question of whether you have malware. You can check with:
DetectX Swift (free)
https://sqwarq.com/detectx/
For adware.
and
VirusBarrier Free Edition (free)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/VirusBarrier-Scanner/id1200445649
For malware other than adware.
But, I can tell you now that you aren't infected with any sort of malware. (At least from that e-mail.) How do I know? Because unlike Windows, for which there are millions of pieces of malware, for the Macintosh there is only a handful of malware. And it is more or less all known, including which vectors it arrives by and what it does. While viral e-mails are a huge problem for Windows users, it is just about unheard of for the Macintosh. I can't even remember ANY Mac user EVER reporting that they were infected via an e-mail (I'm not talking about phishing e-mails, which aren't malware).
Generally the answer to "is my Mac infected with malware" is almost always "NO". But the two free programs that I mentioned above are very valuable. Just run them and they almost instantly let you know that you aren't infected by anything. (They may flag a Windows virus that can show up via e-mail. But those are entirely benign when on your Macintosh.)
