Thunderbird 1.0+ and AV software

Hey,

Currently I am testing the Alpha release of the new Thunderbird.
In the options section you can activate a certain option, which i have included in this post.

If I am correct Avast will perfectly quarantine viruses,…will this possible conflict with Thunderbird?
Will Avast need an adaption to be compatible with Thunderbird?

Grunger, the team must have the final word but, as far I know, Thunderbird is the one who needs to be compatible with antivirus.
Other email programs allow individual email quarentine…
Glad to know that we could solve and old inconveniance: all mail box was ‘deleted’ or sent to Chest when a virus was found…

From the wording I would have to guess that the new Thunderbird provides an interface that allows each message to be scanned before it is written to the mail store and sounds a bit like the “plugin” for Outlook.

The advantages I see for this over the current complete POP3/SMTP scanning that Avast performs for Thunderbird are:

1)it would most likely be able to scan messages that were sent in an encrypted form

2)it would be able to scan messages received from a server via an SSL session and avoid the need for the “Stunnel” solutions now being used.

It would only alleviate the issue of “mailbox removal” in as much as it could catch more viruses before they reach the mail store by having the extra scanning above.

Since the wording speaks only of “incoming” messages it would appear that there is no interface to allow Avast to certify the outgoing mail in an equivalent way.

I too look forward to the Avast team’s insight.

It would be nice to find out exactly what this function entails or how Thunderbird is going to do this, unfortunately there is no help file in TB (at least there wasn’t the last time I tried it) to give a description.

Being an alpha build I would have thought there would be an active TB forum covering it, perhaps there may be something there.

If as Alan speculates it allows for scanning of previously encrypted email prior to it landing in your in tray, you could test this by receiving an encrypted email with and without the function ticked and see if avast can scan it.

If it’s a ‘plugin’ well, avast! team will have to work to have one… and not just I’ve posted before that TB is the one who needs to work…

Like DavidR I have found it difficult to find any details of this function in the Thunderbird forums.

I did find the “goals” of the Thunderbird 1.1 release here:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/roadmap.html

Where it contains just:

Improved integration with anti-virus applications for POP3 users

Since they are generally seen to be targetting the Outlook community I suspect they would have (again just a guess) written the interface to the same specs as that of Outlook.

Raises an interesting thought - if this feature in Thunderbird were to be used how would you avoid having the incoming mail scanned twice, once in the incoming POP3 stream and then again in this interface?

In fact how is this avoided now by Outlook users of Avast?

I believe the Outlook plugin ‘overrides’ the Internet Mail Plugin. That is when Outlook is opened, the Outlook provider starts and temporarily ‘pauses’ the Internet Mail provider.

I do not experience any problems so far.

I tried to send an email with the “eicar-test-virus” to my pop3.
After disabling Avast providers (Avast refused to download it) i sent an email,…
Then I enabled Avast again and started up Thunderbird,…

Avast moved it directly to the chest,…virus no long in attachement visible
The subject lin is also noted off Virus infection,…which has always been like that before.

I still do not really understand this feature in TB really,…can somebody,
who is more technical-mided, explain me this?

thanx for the help

Grunger,

I am fairly sure that, for a normal POP3/SMTP user, this change to Thunderbird offers no advantages over the present scanning of POP3/SMTP mail by Avast.

Avast currently scans the POP3 and SMTP streams for Thunderbird users, by default scanning all of the messages being transferred. I find it hard to imagine what advantage the Thunderbird developers believe they are offering to the users of the Avast product by this change (beyond those, which are not presently mainstream POP3/SMTP, I have suggested above).