[Mimedefang] Best free antivirus

[Håkon Nilsen (Exinet AS)]

David,

I block most of my virusattacks too with mimedefang, so I don't have a
problem either, just as your example. But wouldn't it be better to scan them
for viruses? If you get an .exe file on mail, it might be something you
want! Have it scanned, if clean - do nothing. Though, the load on the server
would be high, even for my few thousand customers.

But of course, the 'block everything dangerous' policy is getting all the
more common. But this is a sad policy.

When I said that I wouldn't rely on free antivirus software, I wasn't
talking about CanIT, Mimedefang or any other filter that can drop the more
dangerous parts of the mail - but mail scanners. I still feel this way,
allthough I can see that there are ppl in this list that really apprechiate
free virus software. Perhaps it's even the best one out there? I honestly
don't know.

But if you pay for it, you can get guarantees. If you're attacked, while you
should have been blocked for this - wouldn't you pick up the phone and call
the ones that supplies your virus killer, and demand that they correct
it/pay up? I sure know that's how I, or at least my bosses, would feel.

I'm currently working on a simple rewrite on the mimedefang filter that
going to be pretty OK for us here at work. Putting stuff, attachments, spam
and all that we don't want locally on a different server, so that they can
check it all on the web if they want to. Some might be of importance.

I'll post it here when I'm done with it.


Best regards,
Haakon Nilsen


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David F. Skoll" <dfs at roaringpenguin.com>
To: <mimedefang at lists.roaringpenguin.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 3:30 PM
Subject: Re: [Mimedefang] Best free antivirus


> On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Håkon Nilsen (Exinet AS) wrote:
>
> > I wouldn't rely on free antivirus to be honest. There are new viruses
every
> > day, and only the big companys can supply you with the latest virus
> > definitions.
>
> Really?
>
> We have a large CanIt customer whose daily mail volume is around 400K
> messages, of which about 120K are viruses.  They use a commercial
> virus scanner.
>
> If this customer had blocked all dangerous extensions (exe, pif, bat,
> etc), plus the specific filename "message.zip", guess how many viruses
> would have slipped through if they hadn't also used the commercial
> virus scanner.
>
> Answer: zero.
>
> Regards,
>
> David.
>
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