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I profess complete ignorance but what is the actual technical process, if any, that lurks behind the quotidian talk of “opening” emails?

it seems to me that the metaphor of the old mail of yore, envelop and all, doesn’t really apply here, or does it? There is no folded letter, no envelop, no seal, just a bitstream, parts of which might be encrypted. But nothing is technically “closed” to to be opened, or is it? Mail clients automatically scan each an every email upon arrival for indexing, spam detection etc. So why this insistence on “do not open” an email as a safety measure against all sorts of nefarious attacks?