Introduction to Anti-virus

Viruses can be one of the most crippling threats to an organization, destroying information and taking computer systems out of action whilst they are rebuilt.

As most viruses these days arrive by email, Mailtraq can play an important role in protecting the organization. Mailtraq enables you to use a number of different technologies to achieve this - you are not locked in to one particular approach or anti-virus vendor.

Mailtraq integrates with the free ClamAV antivirus system as well as the leading antivirus software for mail servers.  

 Anti-virus Options

The anti-virus interface is integrated to the Mailtraq Console under the Options menu.

Do not use  'end-point' editions of anti-virus software.

Mail servers have different requirements for anti-virus than ordinary desktop boxes or file servers.

Open Source Solution
Mailtraq suggests the use of:

• ClamAV: The popular choice
   
• ClamAV is a high performance multi-threaded scalable anti-virus scanning  system designed especially for e-mail scanning on multi-threaded mail gateways, such as Mailtraq
   
• Free & open-source anti-virus
   
• Easy installation package
  (see KB article for installation and configuration information). 

Commercial Solutions

Licensing for Commercial anti-virus software integration has become expensive, and the sophistication of modern anti-virus software is very processor intensive, slowing server performance.

For these reasons, for business installations the best practice is to use a perimeter Gateway anti-virus appliance, either a software appliance on another machine or a hardware device. This provides the best value for money.

Software Appliance 

An example of a software appliance is: Untangle

They offer a free 'lite' version:    
and a full version:

https://www.untangle.com/untangle-ng-firewall/software-packages/
  
They also sell a hardware appliance with either lite or full protection:
    https://www.untangle.com/untangle-ng-firewall/appliances/

Hardware Appliance 

Another supplier of hardware appliances is Barracuda:

For example: https://www.barracuda.com/purchase?sel=bsf&m=100

Support for these products is provided by the respective suppliers.

Using Microsoft Security Essentials or Windows Defender

If you are using MSE or Defender you should use that program's 'settings' to exclude from scan:

WARNING: Using 'regular' desktop (End-point) anti-virus programs

Multi-threaded email servers have particular anti-virus requirements.

This usually means that standard 'desktop' or corporate file-server, or End-point anti-virus software is not suitable.

Errors in processing email can occur resulting in misdirected messages or even database corruption.

Regular desk-top anti-virus programs are, of course, fine to use on your client machines.

Mailtraq 2.5 (and older) users: Although the new and old systems can be run together, the MessageFilter API (used by the AVG plug-in) makes the final decision on what action to take. We recommend that you uninstall the previous plug-in.

* Current versions of Mailtraq use a custom Temp folder within the \database folder.