VPOP3 Antivirus Overview

There are several VPOP3 Antivirus solutions to protect your incoming and outgoing mail from virus infected attachments.

Recommended Methods

Integrated virus scanner solution

When used with the Sophos SAV Interface product, or the avast! for VPOP3 product, VPOP3 can communicate directly with the antivirus scanning engine to scan all incoming and outgoing emails. Configuration is usually a simple case of checking the box saying 'Use Sophos to scan attachments for viruses', and VPOP3 will do everything else for you. So, for most people these options are the quickest, easiest and most reliable.

With the integrated virus scanner solutions, there are many further options, such as informing the administrator of any viruses which have been blocked in outgoing messages, informing the original sender of any infected attachments they have sent, and so on.

Sophos' SAV Interface is from the renowned Sophos anti-virus company, and comes with 24/7 technical support from Sophos. A 25 user, 1 year licence of SAV Interface costs £275.00 (discounts apply for multi-year licences).

avast! for VPOP3 uses the avast! anti-virus engine from alwil software. A 25 user, 1 year licence of avast! for VPOP3 costs £100.00.

Both these virus scanning engines regularly receive the 100% Virus Bulletin awards

To download either of these solutions go to our downloads page

MailScan for VPOP3

MailScan for VPOP3 is a standalone program which intercepts all communications between VPOP3 and the Internet and scans for emails at that point. It is easy to use, but configuration is performed within MailScan itself, not within VPOP3.

As well as virus scanning all incoming and outgoing emails, MailScan can also perform content scanning, attachment compression/decompression, and more

A 25 user, 1 year licence for MailScan costs £289.00 (discounts apply for multi-year licences)

Other methods

Other email-aware virus scanners

• Many virus scanners, contain an email virus scanner which can check POP3 & SMTP connections for email (either "invisibly",or by using a "proxy server"). These methods work well on users' PCs, but often cannot handle the extra load of running on a mail server, so we do not generally recommend them. Also, care should be taken that you are not breaching the licence conditions of the virus scanning software.

  If you have an up-to-date standard email-aware virus scanner on each user's PC, then you are generally protected against viruses carried by email, but having virus protection on the mail server as well, using one of the above methods, will add an extra layer of protection, and stop users being unnecessarily concerned with receiving alerts about infected messages.

• If you receive your incoming mail using SMTP, then there are many anti-virus SMTP gateways that can be purchased, such as Sophos PureMessage, Symantec Mail Security for SMTP, etc. These products will all work well with VPOP3, but in most cases are more expensive than then integrated scanning methods above, and are more complicated to set up.