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Windows Tips and Tricks
Cloudeight Information Avenue
You Don't Need
Your Anti-Virus Program to Scan Your E-Mail
Windows All Versions - All Email Programs
First, email is a just a
file. A file like any other files. Email whether you read it or not, is
stored on your hard drive. Malicious files attached to an email are
located on your hard drive. To an anti-virus scanner it does not matter
whether the offending file arrived by email, arrived by file-sharing, or
arrived via download. It is all the same. A file is a file is a
file. Email is a file like any other file. Any good, up-to-date
anti-virus program will prevent you from opening a malicious worm or virus no
matter how it arrived at your computer. Until and unless you click the
attachment the virus or worm will not execute. And if you're using
Outlook Express, and if you are current and up-to-date with the latest patches from
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/
installed, malicious files will not execute merely by viewing your email.
Our advice is sound. Email scanning might have been useful a few years
ago,
but not anymore. Seven or eight years ago, one
could wander the Internet and open emails without thinking much about it. Viruses were
rare and the number of people using anti-virus programs was small. With
the Internet Boom of 1999 came an influx of millions of new people using
the Internet and millions of new potential targets for those who have
nothing better to do than to ruin other people's fun. So worms, Trojans,
and viruses became numerous, but still few used good anti-virus
protection.
Email Scanning by anti-virus program is not something we recommend because the
problems it can cause with your email program and
delay that internal email scanning can cause, just don't justify the
minimal (if any) security benefits it may provide. One of the biggest problem caused by email virus
scanners is corrupted Outlook Express DBX (data) files. If these files
become corrupted, whatever mail you have stored in them will be
unreadable. Email virus scanning is the number one cause of corrupted
DBX files; and hence the biggest cause of unrecoverable email. Other
problems are minor but they're a nuisance: Aggravating delays in sending
or receiving email being at the top of the list of problems email
scanning by external anti-virus applications can cause.
Many others do agree with us on shutting off email scanning in your
anti-virus program. The following article by Tom Koch, a Microsoft MVP
explains it best. Mr. Koch details not only why you should turn off your
email scanner but how Outlook Express works, as well as other
interesting and little known Outlook Express facts. Here is an excerpt
from his excellent article by Tom Koch:
"...When encountering the symptoms of DBX corruption, many people
immediately fear that their computer is infected with a virus. As
surprising and ironic as it may seem though, the most common cause of
DBX corruption is not a virus, but rather anti-virus programs that are
configured to scan incoming or outgoing e-mail. Even the most well-known
anti-virus programs have exhibited this problem from time to time. To
lessen the risk of such corruption you should disable the e-mail
scanning module in your anti-virus program. This is usually easy to do
by looking at the user-configurable options in the anti-virus program.
It is not at all necessary to scan e-mail for viruses to protect your
computer.
Now before you dismiss me as mad, let me explain why e-mail scanning is
unnecessary. Almost every anti-virus program for Windows installs by
default a system scan that runs in the background every time Windows
starts. This scan is necessary to protect your computer. If you receive
a virus in an e-mail attachment, the virus cannot do anything at all
until you actually open the attachment. ..."
See
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/community/columns/filecorruption.mspx
to read the rest of this article.
The most important thing, and we cannot emphasize this strongly enough,
is to use a good, reputable anti-virus program (AVAST and AVG are two
good free ones) and keep it updated daily! An anti-virus program which
is not updated if very often worse than none at all. AV applications
with outdated definition files will return false-positives
and ignore real threats. So, above all, keep your anti-virus program
up-to-date. And, for extra, added-safety, NEVER open an attachment directly from your email.
ALWAYS save it to your desktop (or another easily accessible folder) and
scan it with your anti-virus program before opening it. Another thing we
cannot emphasize enough: Keep your Microsoft Windows current. Either
turn on automatic updates or visit
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ at least once a week.
Finally, we recommend that weekly you visit
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ weekly, just to be sure that
no virus or worm has made its way around your anti-virus program. A
second opinion never hurts and it's good insurance policy that provides
you with the peace of mind that comes with knowing that you're
anti-virus has indeed been doing its job. And, above all, as we always
tell you: Common sense is your best protection from the threats you face
every day while your on the Internet.
More often than not, many
problems with sending, receiving and composing email, can be directly
traced to anti-virus scanners which are set to perform the unnecessary
and redundant task of scanning email as it downloads into your email
program. Worse are those programs which scan your inbound and outbound
mail and insert the unnecessary "This email has been scanned by AVG (or
AVAST or Whatever) anti-virus ...". It's intrusive and anything that
inserts things into your email automatically, inserts the same thing
into every email you send. Your recipient does not care that you have
AVG scanning your email - the only reason that is inserted into your
email is because it promotes the anti-virus program you use. Huh? Yes,
that little blurb at the bottom of your email "this email has been
scanned by so-and-so anti-virus...." is nothing more than an
advertisement. Are you sure you want ads inserted into your email -
every email you send?
You should disable your
anti-virus program's email scanning feature and trust your anti-virus to
scan all files for problems. Since email is a file, like any other file,
if your anti-virus program is doing its job it will detect any malicious
files attached to email. And if you're careful, as we always remind you
to be, you're not going to be opening attachments directly from email
anyway - unless you're absolutely, positively, sure you know what they
are, who they are from, and you were expecting the attachment. If you
aren't sure and weren't expecting an attachment from someone you know
and trust, then don't open it directly from email. If you feel you just
must know what the attachment is, and your curiosity gets the best of
you, then at least save the file to your desktop first, right-click it,
and scan it with your anti-virus program - just to be doubly sure what
you're clicking isn't something you'll wish you hadn't clicked.
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