Transparently disinfecting attachments

[Matthew Davis]

* Julian Field (mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK) wrote:
> At 20:21 17/12/2002, you wrote:
> >On Tue, 2002-12-17 at 18:47, Julian Field wrote:
> > > At 17:15 17/12/2002, you wrote:
> > > >I may be missing something obvious, but with MailScanner 4.10-1 and
> > > >f-prot, is there any way to disinfect a file (e.g. a word document) and
> > > >put it back into the email rather than emailing the disinfected one
> > > >seperately?
> > > >
> > > >(hope I made enough sense then :)
> > >
> > > I intentionally didn't do this. I'm not sure entirely why, but I did have a
> > > very good reason at the time. For one thing it makes management aware that
> > > MailScanner has fixed the problem for them, and advertising gently to one's
> > > PHBs is usually a good idea, makes them want to carry on paying you :-)
> >
> >Very true, but wouldn't adding in an extra attachment just before it do
> >the job just as well? :)
> >
> >I have to admit that the current way works fine, but I'm planning on
> >using it to virus scan email for customers, so transparent is good from
> >that point of view (as long as you tell them that you did something
> >obviously!)
>
> It's quite a major structural change in the code, so I'm a bit reluctant to
> do it.

If you disinfect the file, how are you 100% the virus scanner disinfected it?  I would say that if a file was flagged for a virus, I'm safer without that file.