Introduction to Anti-virus

Viruses can be one of the most crippling threats to an organization, destroying information and taking computer systems out of action whilst they are rebuilt.

As most viruses these days arrive by email, Mailtraq can play an important role in protecting the organization. Mailtraq enables you to use a number of different technologies to achieve this - you are not locked in to one particular approach or anti-virus vendor.

Mailtraq integrates with the free ClamAV antivirus system as well as the leading antivirus software for mail servers.  

 Anti-virus Options

The anti-virus interface is integrated to the Mailtraq Console under the Options menu.

Mail servers have different requirements for anti-virus than ordinary desktop boxes or file servers.

Mailtraq suggests the use of:

• ClamAV:
  Free & open-source anti-virus
  (see KB article for installation and
  configuration information). 

Mailtraq Anti-virus integration has also been tested with the following approved products: 

• Command Anti-Virus: version 4 or greater, www.authentium.com
   
• Grisoft AVG: www.grisoft.com (see KB article for configuration)
   
• Sophos: version 3 or greater, www.sophos.com
   
• Symantec Anti-Virus Scan Engine: version 4.3 or greater,  www.symantec.com
   

WARNING: Using 'regular' desktop anti-virus programs

Multi-threaded email servers have particular anti-virus requirements. This usually means that standard 'desktop' or corporate file-server end-point anti-virus software is not suitable. Errors in processing email can occur resulting in misdirected messages or even database corruption.

Regular desk-top anti-virus programs are, of course, fine to use on your client machines.

Mailtraq 2.5 (and older) users: Although the new and old systems can be run together, the MessageFilter API (used by the AVG plug-in) makes the final decision on what action to take. We recommend that you uninstall the previous plug-in.