I wanted to ask for an opinion on email scanning for clients with Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition 9.x. Currently we have Symantec Antivirus Server setup in our network environment. The primary SAV server is installed and running with clients to receive updates from the primary server. There is one option that I have been debating for some time as to whether we should disable it. It has to do with turning off the auto protect feature to scan email attachments on client machines. Symantec suggests turning off this feature if users are downloading large attachments over slow connections, mail performance is affected. Given that we have three sites with slow connections I thought I would try disabling this feature as Outlook has always ran traditionally slow for those sites. We have auto-protect protection enabled, but the question is would this be enough protection without email scanning? Our head office has exchange antivirus measures in place before messages arrive to our exchange server.
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Disable Email Scanning
- Thread starter dgeddis
- Start date
In theory, there is a three tier protection in place.
1) The Exchange virus checker that scan the mailbox store.
2) The email scanning when the client download the emails from the exchange server.
3) When you open attachments, the file has to be saved locally before it’s executed. So again, checked by the real-time protection.
So, you should be OK to disable the email virus checking and still be protected by the other two. Just remember that some viruses do not come in the form of attachments but appear in the message body. So make sure your Exchange scanning is kept up-to-date with virus definitions and scans message bodies.
We use POP over SSL, so don't have internet email scanning either (as this is not supported).
1) The Exchange virus checker that scan the mailbox store.
2) The email scanning when the client download the emails from the exchange server.
3) When you open attachments, the file has to be saved locally before it’s executed. So again, checked by the real-time protection.
So, you should be OK to disable the email virus checking and still be protected by the other two. Just remember that some viruses do not come in the form of attachments but appear in the message body. So make sure your Exchange scanning is kept up-to-date with virus definitions and scans message bodies.
We use POP over SSL, so don't have internet email scanning either (as this is not supported).
- Thread starter
- #3
Thanks. The information you have provided has been very helpful. That gives me some piece of mind. I will look at disabling email scanning for those sites to see if we get a performance gain. If we don't see any performance gains I may leave email scanning enabled.
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