I am mainly using Yahoo Mail(web-based)…I’ve never used email client like OE or ThunderBird. One great feature of Yahoo Mail is it uses Norton Antivirus to scan incoming & outgoing emails. Does it mean that my emails are being scanned by 2 antivirus(Norton & Avast)? Is there a chance of conflict between the 2? How different or how similar is the email scanning being done by Yahoo on my emails to the one being done by Avast’s email scanner component?
If you have avast installed, yes, the email will be scanned by the ISP (Norton) and your computer (avast). There isn’t any chance of conflict.
The scanning uses different engines and different virus databases.
You’re more protected than other users (at least for email).
Very well said! Thanks for your swift, short, and precise answers to my questions.
You’re welcome. Feel free to come back any time you need help you just to change experiences 8)
Just to be clear:
You are not using the email scanning capability of avast in any way at all when you read your Yahoo mail on the Web interface.
If you are using the Webshield of avast then the displays of your email in the browser are being scanned by avast just as any other web page would be. If you download attachments from your Yahoo emails to your hard drive then you are relying on the Standard Shield of avast to perform a scan possibly on writing the attachment or else on reading it.
If your browser provides a capability to scan downloaded files with your antivirus program then you are well advised to use it. (For example - with Firefox I use the Download Statusbar extension that allows me to have all downloads scanned by avast).
Interestingly enough Yahoo does not scan the mail until you select it for display on the Web when it is then subjected to a scan - it is not scanned when added to the Yahoo mail store.