[wellylug] email virus scanners

[Brent Wood]

>  On Thu, 2006-12-28 at 09:58 +1300, Nic Cave-Lynch wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> I've finally made the leap to a Linux desktop (Fedora Core 6). I'm currently 
> going through the painful business of replacing all my key applications.
> 
> One thing though: what about virus scanning, particularly of email? I've
> got a license for AVG for Linux, so that can do the periodic file scans, but
> incoming mail??? AVG seems to require some arrangement with postfix or 
> sendmail or similar, and will then scan as mail gets picked up by those. I 
> just use Thunderbird and Opera for mail, and they pick up from the pop3 
> machines at  various ISPs. That doesn't seem to fit the AVG model.
>  
> Sooo: am I just thinking about mail virus scanning the wrong way, (maybe I 
> should just assume that Linux doesn't have mail viruses so I don't need to 
> worry: seems risky)? Or should I go the postfix route and use AVG like that
> 
> (though I can't quite get my head around what I need to do to make that
work)? 
> Or is there some other virus scanning solution that I should be looking at?
>
> Or something else entirely?
> 
> What do other people do? Any suggestions/comments?
> 

Hi Nic,

Not really an answer to you directly, but my 02c on this subject generally...

For your purposes, as Jethro suggests, there is probably no real neeed for a
virus scanner. However, using the "nice neighbour" approach to computing it is
probably a good idea to still have a virus filter so at least you don't
propagate Windows viruses to those unfortunate enough to still be vulnerable to

them :-)

Most Linux virus filters will detect Windows viruses in emails & allow you to
dispose of them, instead of perhaps forwarding them.

Being the cause of a virus in a friend's PC is not a nice thing to do, even if
your system isn't vulnerable to them. 


Cheers,

  Brent Wood