Clean virus in email attachment after manual scan

system · 2007-06-24T14:47:41.000Z

Can anyone advise how to clean up detected virus in email attachment after manual scan of Outlook .pst file?

DavidR · 2007-06-24T15:11:50.000Z

With extreme care as allowing avast to extract an infected email from within a file is fraught with danger of corruption or loss of the .pst file.

I assume this detection was during an on-demand scan and not during on-access scan ?
Check the avast! Log Viewer (right click the avast icon), Warning section, this contains information on all avast detections. Hopefully it will give you enough information, perhaps email subject or infected attachment to do a search within Outlook. Even if you have to order emails by those with attachments you may be able to find it.

Once you find it manually delete it and then clear the deleted emails folder and then compact your email folders. Sorry I can’t be too much practical help here as I’m not an Outlook user.

system · 2007-06-24T16:35:55.000Z

DavidR post:2:

With extreme care as allowing avast to extract an infected email from within a file is fraught with danger of corruption or loss of the .pst file.

I assume this detection was during an on-demand scan and not during on-access scan ?
Check the avast! Log Viewer (right click the avast icon), Warning section, this contains information on all avast detections. Hopefully it will give you enough information, perhaps email subject or infected attachment to do a search within Outlook. Even if you have to order emails by those with attachments you may be able to find it.

Once you find it manually delete it and then clear the deleted emails folder and then compact your email folders. Sorry I can’t be too much practical help here as I’m not an Outlook user.

Thanks David for the help. Yes, it was on-demand scan, and the Warning section does contain list of all virus detected with indeed enough information to identify which email and attachment. This is the first time I use Avast! 4 Home to scan email file. Unfortunatly about 40 emails’ worms and trojan-horses (Warezov-XX and Win32:Tibs-AXX) were detected and shown in the Warning section. In fact when they were detected during on-demand scanning, Avast poped up a window requesting for actions such as Delete, Move/Rename, or Move To Chest; I did all that but the affected attachedment files were not deleted, or moved. I know I can manually search the email subject and delete the affected email/attachment one by one, but with 46 of them, I hope to find some tools to do it. Any explanation of why Avast’s prompted actions are not effective would be appreciated; or any other suggestion of alternative tool to solve this problem other than manually search and delete them one by one? Thanks in advance.

DavidR · 2007-06-24T17:23:02.000Z

The problem is that the .pst is a single file, a rather special database file that contains the emails and their attachments, avast has to extract that infected email and attachment and put the database file back together without damaging it. That isn’t simple and it may that avast aborted any change as it may corrupt the .pst file, effectively resulting in total loss.

There are many AVs that would simply delete the infected file, the .pst file with disastrous results. Under normal circumstances avast would simply be moving an infected file to the chest, now it is entirely possible that it could move the whole .pst file to the chest, which you wouldn’t like. Also there is a file size limit and the chest is also limited in size so that may be why nothing was moved as the pst file is huge. Check the avast Program Settings, Chest, where you can adjust the sizes as required.

So I hope you can see as onerous as it is finding them manually is preferable to the possible loss of all your emails.

It is unfortunate that these emails weren’t detected prior to your installation of avast. I’m afraid there isn’t a simple solution.

Lisandro · 2007-06-24T18:22:35.000Z

DavidR post:4:

The problem is that the .pst is a single file, a rather special database file that contains the emails and their attachments, avast has to extract that infected email and attachment and put the database file back together without damaging it. That isn’t simple and it may that avast aborted any change as it may corrupt the .pst file, effectively resulting in total loss. There are many AVs that would simply delete the infected file, the .pst file with disastrous results.

I fully agree with David. I’ve seen this bad movie more than once…

system · 2007-06-25T14:49:49.000Z

Thanks to all for the caution advice.

DavidR · 2007-06-25T16:12:41.000Z

No problem, glad we could help.

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