[Mimedefang] Which antivirus?

[Chris Gauch]

> I disagree with James but not for technical reasons.  The choice of McAfee
> for me is typically decided by the "Cover Your A**" (CYA) Doctrine ;-).
> 
> Customers/Employees/Bosses who get a virus will demand that you make best
> efforts to get rid of viruses and unfortunately ClamAV hasn't gotten much
> trade press.
> 
> Therefore, using McAfee is using a brand name that has worldwide
> acceptance
> and is #2 in the US for Anti-viral software.  Since I also recommend
> Symantec's Corporate Edition for Servers/Desktops (#1 in the US), we are
> then using the #1 & #2 Commercial software and ClamAV (the best Open
> Source
> anti-viral software).

Agree 100% with Kevin.  We have a cluster of MD servers at our facility that
run ClamAV for all virus scanning at the gateway, but in order to "appease"
our clients, we still run a copy of McAfee on our CommuniGate Pro server
where most corporate and client mail accounts reside .  Most of the time
prospective clients want to know what AV software we are running on our mail
servers.  If we told the client that we use ClamAV exclusively, they'd
probably shy away and look at another service provider -- nothing to do with
the effectiveness of ClamAV, it's just that the client has never heard of
it.  In our case, we can say that we run ClamAV in combination with McAfee,
and the clients are immediately sold on the AV solution.  The irony is that
we run both ClamAV and McAfee (McAfee runs at a higher priority) on our
CGPro server and I've seen ClamAV catch plenty of viruses that McAfee
permits through.  So, in reality, ClamAV (in our case) has been far more
reliable than McAfee -- both AV systems are kept equally up-to-date, but
ClamAV definitely has the edge.

- Chris 

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Chris Gauch
Systems Administrator
Digicon Communications, Inc.
cgauch at digicon.net