Sophos - Email Scan

[Mattt]

I've just moved from AVG Free to Sophos on my home machine (I get a free license). It found 8 suspicious items, half were fine, but AVG had missed a few.

Does it scan incoming mail? AVG used to show you when it did this, but I can see no obvious 'scanning' when Outlook downloads a message. One mail server has scanning built in, but the second one I use doesn't - so I want attachments to be scanned.

[K77-widow maker]

check out avast.com
they have a free home user AV program on their www site.
I've been using the pro version for some time and it's great.
much lighter than mcafee / norton, and more useable than sophos

[buggalugs]

Mattt said:

I've just moved from AVG Free to Sophos on my home machine (I get a free license). It found 8 suspicious items, half were fine, but AVG had missed a few.

Does it scan incoming mail? AVG used to show you when it did this, but I can see no obvious 'scanning' when Outlook downloads a message. One mail server has scanning built in, but the second one I use doesn't - so I want attachments to be scanned.

I don't think a standard sophos client install does pop3 scanning, but you could test it by emailing yourself a copy of EICAR.

[Mattt]

EICAR gets through to my PC (even through the server that I thought had scanning), only when I try to open the attachment does Sophos pop up.

[league67]

Sophos doesn't scan incoming email unless you have their desktop firewall product (I don't so don't know if it scans emails with that). I have it on corporate network so all messages are scanned (via Sophos PureMessage) before they are delivered to mail clients.
Just a thought if you enable OnAccessScan and then open a message does it come up with popup ?

[buggalugs]

Mattt said:

EICAR gets through to my PC (even through the server that I thought had scanning), only when I try to open the attachment does Sophos pop up.

Sounds like that email server is not scanning quite as well as hoped then!! Sophos is more targeted at business PC's where the email server will be covered by a separate product really. I'd say that as long as it's stepping in before you can access any bad attachments then you're probably OK for 99.9% of the time.