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At 10:53 AM 11/7/2002 -0500, you wrote: >Hello Everyone: > >I am interested in getting information on Antivirus Software, that offers >the most protection at a reasonable price. I believe you already have most everything at your disposal that you need for antivirus protection. I'll explain a little more later. >We run a wide variety of e-mail clients, and because there is no >antivirus filtering on the SMTP pilot server, we encounter a lot of infected >e-mail attachments. Additionally some of my users get 25-50 spam messages >a day. It does not appear as if there is any filtering going on at the >SMTP server for virus or for spam, so what is one to do? What I have done is setup a secondary mail server, and have user accounts setup on this machine where they check their mail. Those users can then set their pilot account to forward to the new mail server. The mail server uses SpamAssassin to tag possible SPAM based on content analysis of the received email. The end-user can easily set filters on their mail client to automatically drop all tagged messages into a SPAM folder for them to review on their own time. This secondary server also does virus checking at the MTA level before it makes it to the users inbox. Depending on the resources available to you, this might not be a realistic option, or it may be overkill. However, I've found this solution to work great for eliminating 99.9% of the SPAM and viruses from ever making it into my inbox. If MSU won't provide the tools to address the problems for whatever reasons they may have, users end up with the responsibility to try to manage these problems on their own. It can become quite a hassle for people who have actively used their pilot accounts for many years. >The university is offering Corporate Edition which is basically a >Local file system AV system, on the other hand AV 2002 and AV 2003 >scan incoming emails for most POP3 mail clients. NAV Corporate Edition is a full-featured antivirus program, but the interface is scaled down because it is meant to be centrally managed through Symantec's System Control Center. It provides filesystem and realtime protection just like the other antivirus programs do, and it also covers network shares. You can set it to update the virus definitions on a daily basis, and anything you download in your email would automatically be checked for viruses before it could be executed. However, as Mel stated, that licence is set to expire on December 31, 2002. (At least for the version provided to the students.) I'm uncertain if this will mean the end of the availability of virus updates or not. >(NIS) Norton Internet Security 2002, and 2003 offer AV 2002 and 2003 >respectively, Might this be worthwhile to purchase this to get the AV >protection, and the Personal firewall, and spam alert with NIS 2003 or is >this over doing it? If you have only a couple of standalone PC systems, this may be a good option for you. Aside from the non-intuitive interface that Symantec is known for, the product seems to do it's job well. I would suggest seeing if you can get your hands on the System Control Center and continue to use the corp. edition if you want to centrally manage all of the virus definitions and policies for the workstations you're responsible for. That's my two cents.. -Russell