Re: [Evolution] Virus scanning in Evo



Just to comment on the added burden of wading though the useless virus
infected emails.  Adding a virus scanner to Evo wouldn't be help and is
likely overkill.

You really need to boil it down to the root of the problem and see these
messages as they are -- SPAM.  

A bayesian filter takes care of these messages for me.  I saw two or
three this week and that's it (but I recieved over 50).  

The good news is that there has been talk about adding a Bayesian filter
to Evo 2.0

Cheers,
Chris

On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 20:50, Greg Macek wrote:
I think while everybody makes true statements that Linux is not
susceptible to most or all the viruses out there, but the fact remains
that we could be recipients of annoying emails with windows virus
attachments in them. Having a anti-virus filter tied with Evo (for those
who don't have it on their mail server) would be nice to have, so we
wouldn't have to go through all those useless messages. 

On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 16:59, Andre Truter wrote:
On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 18:38, Fred Blaise wrote:
Linux not vulnerable to viruses... well this is new to me...

This is an academic statement.
Yes, it is possible to write a virus for Linux and Unix, but there are a
few things that make them less of a threat.

There have been a few concept virii written for Linux, to prove a point
and there is even a Linux-virus HOWTO
(http://www.lwfug.org/~abartoli/virus-writing-HOWTO/_html).

The thing is that on Linux the probability that you will get infected by
a virus through mail is very slim.  You will basically have to install
the virus yourself on your system.

Files are normally not executable in Linux. You have to make it
executable and run it before it can do anything and then it will only
affect your user account, not the system.
Linux mail clients normally will not execute any attachments.

You have a better change of being hit by a cracker that exploit some
vulnerability on your system and gain access to your machine and install
some worm or something on your machine, than getting a virus via e-mail.

You should rather think of getting a firewall set up.

Let's say that virus makers target what's easier...

Yes, writing a virus for Windows is *much* easier than Linux, because
Linux does not cater for the environment that is needed by a virus to
work.

There have even been challenges with prize money to infect a Linux box
with a virus and so far nobody had any success.
http://www.roaringpenguin.com/mimedefang/anti-virus.php3
http://www.silicon.com/news/500013/1/1028211.html
-- 
Christopher Ness
Software Engineering IV,
McMaster University
PGP Public Key: http://nesser.homelinux.org/pgp-key/ 

sketchy running 2.4.20-18.9 kernel on Red Hat Linux release 9 (Shrike).
22:25:02 up 1 day, 14:36, 1 user, load average: 0.25, 0.25, 0.20 

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