VPOP3 Antivirus Overview
There are several VPOP3 Antivirus solutions to protect your incoming and outgoing mail from virus infected attachments.
Recommended Methods - Integrated virus scanner solutions
When used with the Sophos SAV Interface product, or the VPOP3 Antivirus product, VPOP3 can communicate directly with the antivirus scanning engine to scan all incoming and outgoing emails. Configuration is usually a simple case of checking the box saying 'Use Sophos to scan attachments for viruses', and VPOP3 will do everything else for you. So, for most people these options are the quickest, easiest and most reliable.
With the integrated virus scanner solutions, there are many further options, such as informing the administrator of any viruses which have been blocked in outgoing messages, informing the original sender of any infected attachments they have sent, and so on.
Sophos SAV Interface
VPOP3 Antivirus
The VPOP3 Antivirus product uses the popular ClamAV anti-virus engine. A 25 user, 1 year licence for VPOP3 Antivirus costs £70.00.
To download either of these solutions go to our downloads page
MailScan for VPOP3
MailScan for VPOP3 is a standalone program which intercepts all communications between VPOP3 and the Internet and scans for emails at that point. It is easy to use, but configuration is performed within MailScan itself, not within VPOP3.
As well as virus scanning all incoming and outgoing emails, MailScan can also perform content scanning, attachment compression/decompression, and more
A 25 user, 1 year licence for MailScan costs £289.00 (discounts apply for multi-year licences)
Other methods
Other email-aware virus scanners
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Many virus scanners, contain an email virus scanner which can check POP3 & SMTP connections for email (either "invisibly",or by using a "proxy server"). These methods work well on users' PCs, but often cannot handle the extra load of running on a mail server, so we do not generally recommend them. Also, care should be taken that you are not breaching the licence conditions of the virus scanning software.
If you have an up-to-date standard email-aware virus scanner on each user's PC, then you are generally protected against viruses carried by email, but having virus protection on the mail server as well, using one of the above methods, will add an extra layer of protection, and stop users being unnecessarily concerned with receiving alerts about infected messages.
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If you receive your incoming mail using SMTP, then there are anti-virus SMTP gateways that can be purchased.
These products will all work well with VPOP3, which is an SMTP server, but in most cases are more expensive than then integrated scanning methods above, and are more complicated to set up.
Please note that no virus scanner will be able to 100% protect against viruses. Common sense is the best protection against virus infection - do not open attachments if you are not expecting them and do not recognise who sent them to you.