Recommended Antivirus Practices

SmarterMail supports multiple methods of antivirus protection for securing your mail server. The default installation includes, at no additional cost, effective and self-updating antivirus protection with ClamAV. SmarterMail also supports additional third-party solutions, including command-line antivirus solutions and Cyren Zero-hour Antivirus. (Cyren Zero-hour Antivirus is a paid SmarterMail add-on and can be licensed in 12-month subscriptions. Start a 30 day trial in the Licensing settings, or contact SmarterTools Sales for purchasing details.) In addition, SmarterMail has the ability to check a quarantine directory and respond to users that attempted to send an email containing a virus.

When proper antivirus solutions are in place within SmarterMail, using an antivirus solution at the network level is not necessary. In fact, antivirus solutions at the network level can cause numerous issues for system administrators and/or users. Therefore, it is NOT recommended.

For example, antivirus solutions at the network level can't relay information to SmarterMail in a reliable way, which may cause confusion for users as they won't know why a message wasn't delivered or why it may show an attachment, but there is nothing attached to the email. If a network antivirus solution removes suspected virus attachments from an incoming email, the email will still be delivered to the recipient. However, while the message list will show that the email contains an attachment, no attachments will be available. Not only does this leave the user with no information regarding the missing attachments, it leaves them vulnerable to receiving, and perhaps responding to, email from malicious sources.