Originally posted here by Airhead
One thing I'm a bit confused about. Is there something about the way Norton Antivirus does their scan that is different from the way Panda does their online ActiveScan? The reason I ask is that Panda's online scan caught a Majistr-infected attachment in an old email on my computer. It had apparently been sitting there for a few months and I'd forgotten about it and had never opened it. It is entirely possible that I had temporarily disabled email scanning at the time it came in, then if the email files were in the exclusion list, it wouldn't have been caught by Norton during my full scans.
Well, as txwebman said, I think, the defaults are there for a reason... my guesses with Norton? Chances are your email system has a NAV plug-in that it should be using, so it's pointless to scan the mail database from the filesystem when using the plug-in should be able to give it a more-comprehesive scan (including, for example, the ability to decrypt messages that are encrypted with a key held by your mail client or another plugin or similiar, etc).

So, in short, it's up to you to make the best policy decisions for your own network(s) and or system(s) and, well, you have to live by the consequences of such a choice.

Also, if Norton can scan the email as it is coming in (if that option is chosen), why shouldn't it be able to handle a scan of email when doing a full scan?
(I think I kinda answered this above, too)


Also, please remember that a virus scanner is simply a sophisticated "pattern matcher." So, there's always the caveat that a discussion about an virus can trigger an alarm on a message... or similiar.


My general principles about dealing with possibly-infected files... and this goes for things sent from people I know.

  • Never trust an email attachment (particularly *.exe or *.scr)
  • When dealing with documents sent to you, always use a viewer (not MSOffice)