Handling junk email and viruses
We recognise that email viruses and junk email are both an ever increasing
source of problems for most Internet users.
Staff at the WEB Centre have authored an open source product called
MailScanner that is able to run on an email gateway or server and detect
both viruses and junk (spam) email. The virus detection success rate is
very high (the WEB Centre servers use Sophos, with virus patterns updated
every day), and the spam detection rate can reach over 75%.
If you wish to see if an email message delivered on one of our servers,
or forwarded through it, has been marked as virused or as spam, look for
the following special headers in the email:
X-WEBC-MailScanner:
- may indicate the presence of a virus
X-WEBC-SpamCheck:
- may indicate the email is "junk" if the spam
marking lists one of the matching methods, e.g. SpamAssassin, ORDB-RBL,
or osirusoft.com.
Where a virus is detected we will clean the attachment, indicate the
problem to the recipient, and send a warning to the source of the virus
(unless the Virus is Klez, which does not use genuine email addresses).
We do not block any junk email we detect, we instead use the above X-header
marking to allow the customer to choose what action to take, using their
own email filters.
For more information on MailScanner, see our
MailScanner web site. This
software is freely available, but we can also offer consultancy in installing
it.
NB 1. We do not virus scan attachments in .dat format (as can be generated
for example by MS Exchange users) as the Unix mail scanner cannot decode
the attachment to scan it.
NB 2. We do not guarantee 100% accuracy in virus or spam detection. We
advise customers to run their own anti-virus methods also, and to ensure
they update their own virus patterns regularly.
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