Email virus protection

Thu Aug 21 17:07:26 UTC 2003

Crist Clark wrote:
> Unless your AV software has a clue, like most do, and unzips archives
> and see what's inside.
which is ideal for virus scanning, but not for blanket-blocking of email.
A zipped archive containing an executable cannot (unless something has
changed that I don't know about) be automatically opened by any mail
client - the user must make a deliberate attempt to open the archive then
exectute the attachment (although the actual extraction can be performed
automatically by many decompression utilities if you double-click an
executable or document inside its browser)
there is of course no allowing for the stupidity of users - but if you
have a stupid enough user you could induce him to bypass any protection
anyhow.