Yeah, I have read a little bit about macro, boot sector, trojans etc, 
viruses, and know the general behavior of them.  I thought the message 
containing the virus was in an attached file, and when you open and ran that 
file, you would run the  virus.  I did not think it would do damage to your 
system just by opening the message.  If the virus code was in the message, it 
would just look like a bunch of gibbirish in High and low ASCII.
BTW, I currently run Mcaffe AntiVirus on my Win95 System, however, I am going 
to purchase Inculan AntiVirus in about a week or so.  I even have a virus 
simulator program which simuletes the general behavior of a bunch of families 
of viruses.
Quoting Nancy Wood To Paul Heldt:
Most of the websites for virii scanning programs have help .htmls which you
can read online or download and read at your leisure.  Those help
screens/.htmls are very informative, telling what virii are and how they
become active on your system...
BTW, you're not the first person - and won't be the last - who 'fell for'
those messages.  Similar ones have been around fidonet long before the
internet was the going thing.  Like you were told, anything from "Good
Times" and other such message claims has been perpetuating for years.
It pays to learn how virii can infect your system.  It also pays to run
anti-virii scanning programming, especially when downloading from the
internet.  McAffee (www.mcaffee.com) and Norton (www.symantec.com) both
have such programming, which will scan downloaded files that are still in
your 'cache' before they are downloaded to the drive(s).  It also pays to
download from reliable sources...
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