E-Mail scanning

[AliceZ]

I notice that the following two are checked (in my NIS 2005):
Scan Incoming E-mail
Scan Outgoing E-mail

Someone said that they should NOT be checked.
Can someone please tell us what to do?

Should they both be CHECKED or NOT CHECKED?

Thank you

 

[clintblack]

They should both be checked. It may slow down your ability to send and receive e-mail, but it is a good idea. Here is why:
Some viruses have the ability to not only infect your computer, but also attach to your address book and send a copy of itself to everybody in your address book. So if you don't have those checked, you could become infected by a virus and it could still replicate and send itself out via your e-mail account. This will piss off a lot of people because they might think that you purposely sent it! So you need to scan incoming AND outgoing e-mail. Keep those boxes checked!

 

[AliceZ]

Thanks. The only reason I asked was that someone said if I was using AOL 9 Optimized and they had their own email checking (??), there was no need for the NIS 2005 scanning of incoming/outgoing email.

 

[clintblack]

Ah. Okay. Now that makes sense. I need to re-phrase what I said because I thought that you were using Microsoft Outlook. If you use web-based e-mail (anything that does not use a POP3 server hooked up to Outlook), then you don't need to have the incoming and outgoing email scanner on because it won't scan those. Symantec is designed to scan e-mails as they are sent/received by Microsoft Outlook (using port 110). If you use AOL and only sign on via the website, you don't need the incoming/outgoing e-mail scanner on (especially since AOL already has a virus scanner).

 

[JimWells]

I would leave it turned on for outbound email -- which is port 25, just in case your computer is ever compromised by a trojan/virus and used for spamming.