Infected attachments

[argyll]

I know I'm not the only one who suffers a daily onslaught of 40-50 emails with attachments that I'm meant to open and infect my PC with whatever nasty surprise is contained within. Business users are particularly prone to a double helping of them. They inevitably have a message like 'hi', or 'I have your picture' or some other load of infantile rubbish and whilst Norton will deal with the contents, I cant really see an end to the daily grind of manually deleting them. Unlike spam the majority of which can be blocked, these infected messages just keep showing up. Just wondered if anyone has found a good way to deal with them.

 

Gerry Castles

[Newt]

I've tried before to see if anyone had AV that could be set to delete infected attachments without asking you about it. Set to 'don't clean, don't safe guard, just delete the stupid thing'.

 

No luck so far finding anyone who admits to having such a thing.

 

I've recently switched from Norton to the free version of AVG in hopes that it will offer more options but nothing infected since I got it so don't know for sure.

 

There are a couple of high-end server products you can get that will deal with them so you never see them but the cost is beyond high so no good unless you have 300 users or something.

[poledark]

Interesting one this..I am sure my Norton was set to auto delete any virus, but now I don't seem to have that option!

 

It is bang up to date version.

 

There is an option to "deny access" but mine is set to "automatically repair the infected file"

 

I have cleared out my deleted folder (it had 60 mails in it). I think I had deleted them myself but will leave all mails in the Inbox for a while and check if there are any deleted ones appearing.

 

Den

 

[ 11. June 2004, 09:52 PM: Message edited by: poledark ]

[Jim Roper]

Norton has an option: 'Repair then silently delete if unsuccessful'.

I expect this applies to the infected attachment and not the message!

 

[ 12. June 2004, 08:59 AM: Message edited by: Jim Roper ]

[Elton]

It does - my Norton removes the attachment, but I get the text.

[argyll]

This is the kind of thing I get from Norton about 50% of the time

 

'Symantec Email Proxy deleted the following email message:

 

From: enquiries@hoadsresidential.co.uk

To: info@london-lettings.uk.com

Subject: application'

 

Obviously having deleted the message, I stil have to delete the notification from Symantec.

I hope that there are boffins somewhere developing a piece of AVS which obliterates everything and doesn't bother to tell me.

 

The other 50% of the dud mail is flagged up by Norton awaiting a decision about what to do next.

 

Incidentally has anyone else noticed that the level of email with dud attachments falls off significantly at weekends. It seems that most of the traffic eminates from office servers.