Avira not covering incoming mail, help!

I see on the ad that pops up that Avira is not covering incoming email, this is not good.

Does Avast check email? This is a big concern to me as much mail as I get.

Thanks
Pat

Yes, avast! Home Edition contains a resident module for e-mails and news.

http://www.avast.com/eng/avast-free-...tispyware.html

You can configure Avira to do so - just open it and check your settings.

Some of the experts in the field do not think it is necessary to have AV programs monitor email. See the section under "Viral Irony: The Most Common Cause of Corruption" here
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/...orruption.mspx
Certainly it slows things down.

I agree with Jim on this. I think, it's an overkill.

It's a nice comfort factor but as Welshjim's article notes, the truth is, it isn't a necessity. That said, it's a excellent practice to always save attachments to the hard drive and then manually scan them with the AV before opening them...

Quote:

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it's a excellent practice to always save attachments to the hard drive and then manually scan them with the AV before opening them

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Yes, or to take it a step further just don't open any unsolicited attachments at all.

I thought that is someone, say a good friend sent you mail, that if they had an unfound virus on their computer they could pass it to yours just by sending regular mail. Is that right or wrong?

That is true. Or the virus can send a email to everyone in your address book.

But that virus does bypass your AV somehow.

Another thing to be careful about is email address spoofing.
An email with your friend as a sender, might be coming from a bad guy.

Something that may be helpful is to point out that, except for 2 things, saving attachments to the hard drive and then manually scanning them is an exact mirror of what an automated email scanner is doing.

The 2 differences are, you manually do the scanning (versus automation) and the other is that when you manually scan outside of the email, you eliminate the possibility of corrupting your email mailbox (as noted in Jim's article.)

As I said earlier in this thread, there is nothing wrong with having email scanning in an antivirus. I have had them in nearly all AV's I've used. But they just aren't necessary.

(FWIW... If I have an AV with email scanning, I always turn outbound email scanning off. Inbound scanning is not necessary. Outbound scanning is an absolute waste of computer resources!)

Thank you, you are most helpful all of you as usual.

If you just get email can you get a virus or only in an attachment?

I never open email from someone I don't know.

There have been examples of malware (viruses, worms, trojans, etc.) that can execute by just opening the mail. Klez being one I can remember. It exploited code in Outlook and Outlook Express that was later patched by Microsoft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klez

Until patches from Microsoft were issued, the protection for the active version of Klez was an antivirus's real-time scanner. If Klez was part of an attachment, then either manual scanning or an integrated email scanner was the protection. And if a user's AV was not up to date or not working, they got infected. (Klez is a great example of why Windows should ALWAYS be patched. So was the Blaster worm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_worm )

That is why it's advisable to turn off the preview reading pane in Outlook and Outlook Express. It's also why I don't use Outlook/OE and set my email client (The Bat) to display incoming mail as text only.

I have not used OE for a long time, I am using Gmail now.