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 £285.00 (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 £255.00 (discounts apply for multi-year licences)

Other methods

VPOP3 Plugin Pack

The VPOP3 Plugin Pack includes a utility called VPOP3Decode. This can extract out attachments from a message and then call a command-line virus scanner to check for viruses, and then redirect any infected messages to a specified user.

This method works well if you have a virus scanner with a good command-line virus scanner. However, more and more antivirus vendors are moving away from command-line scanners to GUI based ones. This scanning method is also more susceptible to disruption by problems with the virus scanner itself (eg many command-line virus scanners may prompt for user input if a problem occurs, causing problems because VPOP3Decode cannot respond).

Also, this option is much less flexible in what it can do when finding an infected attachment. Other scanning options allow the message to be delivered with a cleaned or removed attachment, the message sender to be informed etc, but the VPOP3Decode option only allows the infected message (including infected attachment) to be directed to a specified user.

However, many people use this scanning method because of the lower cost (£50.00) and use it with their existing virus scanner software.

Other email-aware virus scanners

Some virus scanners, such as Norton Antivirus, contain an email virus scanner which can check POP3 & SMTP connections for email (either "invisibly",or by using a "proxy server"). These methods usually work well, but can be more complex to set up. Also, care should be taken that you are not breaching the licence conditions of the virus scanning software, as much of it is designed for use by a single user, not on an email gateway PC.

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.