On Tue, Jul 13, 1999 at 12:28:14PM -0300,
Eric Dahnke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think a good virus scanning package would be an increadible asset for
> the qmail community. There are not many mailhubs which provide a virus
> scan. Where I worked previously the virus scan package that we used with
> Exchange went for $20,000.
>
> Anyway, I'm a few months from delving heavily into virus scanning, but
> am glad to see that there is already work being done.
>
> Think of how well a virus free outsourced mail service would go over.
> Viruses wreak havoc on corporate LANs.
Dream on. What are you going to do when people use public key encryption
by default? The server won't be able to decode the messages to scan
on behalf of its users.
In the shorter run, viruses will be developed that use a simple encryption
each time they transmit themselves in order to keep the fixed part of the
virus small in order to make virus detection more difficult. They may
also use a number of varient codes to do the decryption part so that even
that may vary with each copy.
Another problem is that virus checking is going to take more and more time
as the number of viruses that have ever been written increases. Virus
scanning just can't work in the long run.
The other question is why this is being done on the mail server instead of
on the end user machines, where there is likely to be a lot of underused
CPU power?
