One of AVGs “features” is that it stamps a footer on the incoming and outgoing emails “certified by AVG, etc”. At home, I use Pegasus as my email client. Since installing the new AVG Free, if I send a Word attachment to my work account, when I open the email in Outlook 2002 the attachment appears as a block of uuencode text. Switch the stamp off and it comes through OK. (The stamp was quite separate from the coded block which had an “END”).
If I try the same thing from home with the Opera email client it will get through to Outlook successfully with or without the stamp. And even curiouser, if I forwarded the duff email to another account and picked it up with my iPaq then PocketOutlook would successfully decode!!
But (to quote Bill Cosby) “I told you that story to tell you this story”. What do folk think of email scanning? Is it necessary? Given I am using an email client that isn’t vulnerable to problems in the email body that leaves only attachments. And attachments should be captured by the resident scanner if one is foolish enough to open them.
Brightmail service hosted by my ISP. You can review the spam folder either through IMAP or a webmail interface (there’s a 7 day wait before stuff is automatically deleted). False positives? I get 50-100 spams a day and for the first few months of the service I carefully reviewed the spam without one false positive. I’m now fairly confident that I can just delete anything that arrives in the folder. You can turn the virus and/or spam filitering off if you choose.
