Bill said:
Is this the best fix you can suggest?
Since it's the one that most often works, yes.
Why can't one scan incoming
messages for viruses? Seems like a good idea to me.
With some AV products, you can. The authors were smart enough to handle the
integration with Outlook correctly. However, in many cases, especially for
larger messages (and HTML and MIME add considerably to the size of a
message), scanning mail adds a significant delay in the communications path
between the client and the server, resulting in timeouts and aborted
sessions. Moreover, scanning mail does NOTHING to increase your safety
level, provided you run the on-access or real-time scanner your AV program
provides. That's the one that examines files as you open or access them. A
virus inside an incoming mail message can't do much to you until you run it.
In order to run it, it must be placed on disk, either deliberately or
automatically when opened. At that point, the on-access scanner will detect
the problem and stop the infection. Outgoing messages either won't be
infected (because your AV program would ALREADY have detected the infection)
or are infected with something your AV program can't detect anyway (since it
would already have detected it if it could), so scanning outgoing messages
is a collosal waste of time. Can you say "marketing ploy"?
