big brother McAfee

[Me]

Using Mailwasher, today I saw a suspicious email (undelivered type message)
and previewed it. McAfee intercepted and alerted to presence of MyDooom, so
I deleted. But then decided to do a full scan to be sure. In the process,
McAfee flagged a little .exe file (a joke type thing) and told me it was a
"Potentially unwanted programme"!!!!

What's next - will it scan my photos and tell me which ones are "potentially
unwanted"????

As an incidental though, if I use the preview option in Mailwasher, would
that leave me open to viruses?

 

[Wrangler]

Hi,

In the process, > McAfee flagged a little .exe file (a joke type thing) and told me it was a
"Potentially unwanted programme"!!!!

You will have most likely have a switch (/Program most likely) enabled when
scanning which will alert you (businesses) to applications which although
not necessarily viruses or malware have in the past or risk causing issue
because of virus like behaviour or activities.

The /NoJokes switch on the command line will go some of the way to sort out
what you are looking for in that it will not alert on Joke programs.

Its not a case of big brother, its most likely a case of customer requests
where a vendor has been asked to apply this kind of functionality against
joke programs to reduce helpdesk calls (and hence $$'s) , where people have
run something they got through email or elsewhere which (for example)
screams "I'm a virus - BOOO!" so they panic and cause company time and
resources to be diverted trying to find out if it is a real virus, or a
prank.

Stopping it at the gateway makes perfect sense in order to block those
before entry. You get a line in a log file, as opposed to a helpdesk call,
engineer resources being diverted etc... it all adds up to wasted time and
money.

What's next - will it scan my photos and tell me which ones are "potentially
unwanted"????

They don't do image analysis in AV scanning...

Would be cool feature though... The ability to filter through those dodgy
holiday photos I wish my wife had not taken... I'd sign up for that

Martin

 

[FromTheRafters]

Using Mailwasher, today I saw a suspicious email (undelivered type message)
and previewed it. McAfee intercepted and alerted to presence of MyDooom, so
I deleted. But then decided to do a full scan to be sure. In the process,
McAfee flagged a little .exe file (a joke type thing) and told me it was a
"Potentially unwanted programme"!!!!

This is a good feature, as long as it can also be turned off.

What's next - will it scan my photos and tell me which ones are "potentially
unwanted"????

Ha ha - I doubt that, but I keep seeing these advertisements with this
annoying man in a butterfly suit purporting to do things similar to this.

What's up with that!? ;o)

As an incidental though, if I use the preview option in Mailwasher, would
that leave me open to viruses?

I'm fairly sure that Mailwasher displays plain text only - no HTML or
other scripting involved. I'm using an old version myself (1.32) and
it poses no problem that I am aware of.

 

[Bart Bailey]

In Message-ID:<[email protected]> posted on Sun, 8 Feb

I'm fairly sure that Mailwasher displays plain text only - no HTML or
other scripting involved. I'm using an old version myself (1.32) and
it poses no problem that I am aware of.

If you're talking about the message preview feature,
it only displays text in Mailwasher Pro v3.4