Call 1-800-660-0740 | Start Live Chat | Try a Demo

Virus Scanning Features


Back to Email Overview

Webmail	Company Directory	Control Panel
Calendar	Spam Filtering	Group Lists
RSS Reader	Virus Scanning	Wireless Email
Contact Manager	POP/IMAP4/SMTP

Our dual scanning virus protection scans all inbound and outbound emails using a multi-stage, dual scanner process. The process is broken down into the following four stages:

Dual Scanning Virus Protection

Stage 1: Restricted Attachments
Here, emails are scanned for dangerous types of file attachments. When an email is sent or received that contains a restricted file attachment, the email is rejected and the sender receives a "bounced" email notification informing them of the restriction.

Stage 2: Normalization
This stage searches for email formatting vulnerabilities that can be used by viruses to hide from virus scanners. If any vulnerability is found, our system corrects the formatting of the message so that it can be thoroughly scanned for viruses.

Stage 3: Decompression
Next, if the email contains any compressed attachments such as zip files, the compressed attachments are temporarily unzipped so that the contents can be scanned for viruses.

Stage 4: The Dual Virus Scan
After the above preprocessing is complete, two separate virus scanners are used to scan the email and all of its uncompressed attachments. Everything is scanned twice to ensure maximum protection against new virus threats. ClamAV (www.clamav.net) and F-Prot (www.f-prot.com) are the current scanners of choice, although our system was designed to be able to plug-in any virus scanner on the market, should the need to do so arise.