Greetings, This morning I opened an e-mail that turned out to be a string of random sentences -- certainly a spam e-mail. There was no attachment and no link in the body of the text. I didn't click on it, of course. But even I know not to do that. I realized I'd opened something suspicious and closed the email -- thinking "What an idiot. I did it again." But now the strange thin happened. My internet connection turned itself off and then came back on. Never seen it do that before. I started running a security software (ClamXav) only to realize it was out of date. This process caused my computer to slow down to a near standstill. I decided after failing to force quit that turning off the computer was the only option. However, it took several tries before I could get the computer to start up again. That was unusual. I did not upgrade my ClamXav because I would have had to make an online payment -- and if I do have malware, I don't want to just GIVE them my credit info. Next oddity (and this is the REAL issue of interest in my mind) was that I checked to see if anything had been downloaded by opening my hard-drive and setting it to 'Date Modified". My application folder came up first and within I discovered that my copy of Firefox had been modified at almost the exact time that I'd opened the email. This is VERY odd. I discovered online that there are malware that run on html and if one has allowed html for emails they can deposit material. Could that have happened here? For indeed, my email client and Firefox were set to allow html email. Can Firefox have been compromised? I'm running old software (System 10.6.8), though the Firefox is the latest version (48.0.1). Any ideas about what might be going on and what steps I should take next? All best wishes, gordon