OE Safety (Preview Pane)?

Hi all,
A friend of mine would like to install OE on a newly upgraded Windows 10 PC (from Win 8.1) She asked me if OE is safe from malware/trojans/viruses running if one is previewing email in the preview pane, and if not, if there is a way to make it safe.
I've looked around these forums and haven't found a definitive answer. If anyone could chime in on this that would be great

As i can understund you are asking if in case someone has an infected pc if there is a way viruses to acces Outlook Express right?
Well, it is very difficult for a virus to access outlook express mail folders because are in such format that are unreadable from external programs and preview pane also cannot be accessed so easily.

The most likely is a virus or malware to access web based email, eg. when you open emails directly from browser, because the browser contents are very easy to be accessed in addition of an installed email client like outlook express.

Thanks for the quick reply Rafail!
Actually, what I was asking is can email-based malware be activated or infect an uninfected pc simply by previewing incoming emails in OE via the preview pane. (If you search the internet, there was a concern of this happening when OE was in common usage.)

Actually outlook express uses internet explorer parts. That happed on old internet explorer versions and affected Outlook also, since on new windows (like 7 8 or 10) internet explorer is newer version and OE now uses new version of internet explorer this bugs been fixed.

Hi Rafail, Thanks for the reply, and sorry it's taken so long to get back to you.
That's what I was wondering about, so that answers my question. I didn't know OE used IE as it's protocol, which should indeed be safer now. Thanks again!

    As an added note, I am still using Windows XP with Outlook Express 6. I disabled the preview pane years ago for the very reason you brought up. Open OE and select "view" from the menu, then "layout". Here you will see a box that can be unchecked to disable the preview pane.

Thanks for the tip geo791, that could come in handy!