sassejan wrote:

I don't want the body of the message open just because its highlighted, from
what I understand if theres a virus in the email and it opens its to late to
delete it, so I use to have it set up that way before my hd crashed but don't
remember how to do it, does anyone know?

The selected message gets shown in the Preview pane. If you don't like
that, disable the Preview pane. You will now have to double-click on an
e-mail to read it. However, not all malicious e-mails are easily
recognized by their headers (To, From, etc.). So you'll still end up
opening e-mails without knowing if they are infected or not.

Getting malware when the Preview pane is no longer a security risk.
Plain text e-mails are harmless. For HTML-formatted e-mails, make sure
that OE is configured to render them under the Restricted Sites security
zone (it's a security option in OE). At that point, the only hazard
with HTML-formatted e-mails is the use of a web beacon to check if
someone opens that e-mail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon) that
is typically hidden in the e-mail. It isn't a problem in plain text
e-mails, or if you configure OE to always display all e-mails as plain
text. However, OE also has the option to block external content to the
HTML code in the e-mail (i.e., linked images). Make sure that option is
also enabled. With the Restricted Sites security zone used to render
and neuter HTML-formatted e-mails and the option to block linked images
in HTML-formatted e-mails, you're safe using Preview mode.

You're even safer if you read all e-mails as plain text. If you get an
HTML-formatted e-mail where you decide to see more than what is shown
when forcing all e-mails to read as plain text, double-click on that
e-mail to open in its own window and change the format to HTML (View -
Message in HTML).

None of the above means you are safe from infected *attachments* for
which you still need to employ anti-virus/malware products to combat.