What should you do when you receive a suspicious link?

Delete it. It’s spam.

@NuclearWessels Good eye! Sounds bad.

Don’t open it. Contact the friend and see if their email account was hijacked.

Contact that friend, preferably via a different means (or send a completely new email if your only way to contact is email) and ask if that email was from him/her.
If your friend’s email account has been hacked, this would do her a favor and alert her..

It’s spam ,I get those occasionally just delete it.

I suppose my actual question would be, how do you ensure a link is safe? Can I scan it somehow?

I’m very reluctant to contact her and ask, it’s my ex from long ago, and don’t want to initiate a dialog. However if she is the one initiating, I’d like to explore the link before I respond.

Is it usual for a spam message to include a persons real name in the email? in the past the ones I’ve gotten have been generic like: “hey check this out”.

Does your email address contain the word Joe in it? It is easy to write a script that checks the string and looks for first names and then plugs in your first name into the email.

@johnpowell No it doesn’t

It probably is a virus. Avoid. A virus that has got into someone’s email can see the email address and also the contact name that has been associated with it. So that could explain the joe bit.

If you haven’t heard from this ex for a long time, you’d be better off not replying anyway even if it is a genuine message. Leave it in the past