Pariot.
It could have been anything. Basically if you dont know who send you the message, dont open it. Even if you do know who sent the message, this can be just as bad, but I will get to that in a minute.
Baby. Technically a virus is a piece of code that attaches itself to a file. Because of this, viruses are fairly easy to detect, and remove. An attachment can be a file with a virus, or the attachment can be something called a worm. This is totally different from a virus in that the attachment is a program designed to do whatever the author of the code wanted. Most of these file attachments have a file name with a *. vbs at the end. The VBS stands for Visual Basic Script. When you open the file, you get whatever the scrip says to do. If this script is written to delete everything on your hard drive, then if you open it, you can kiss your data good bye. If ithe script is designed to send itself to everyone in your address book, then you just unknowingly sent everybody you know a program that can wipe out there data. This is why you are more likely to get one of these worms from someone you know. The script in the worm is only limited to the authors creativity, and desire to wreck havok on your computer. You cant call these viruses since the entire program is most likely bug free. The I Love You worm had 9000 lines of code, and it had fewer bugs than anything Microsoft has done.
Doc... If set up properly, the virus should never make it to the end users desktop. It is much easier to maintain the virus signature on one mail server, than try to keep every computer on the network up to date. On our mail server, it deletes every file attachment that ends with an exe, vbs, zip..... etc. This keeps most bad code from ever reaching the end user. For the attachments that are not deleted, the mail server scans the attachment before it is sent to the end user. This is the safest way of dealing with these things.
Hope this helps.
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