Attachments - packed files

[Michal Kminek]

Julian Field <mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK> wrote ..
> At 15:37 03/03/2003, you wrote:
> >         I want to just make sure that MailScanner doesn't unpack
> >attachments with a corresponding external program. Why am I asking?
> >Some antivirus scanners aren't perfect and I want to unpack all the
> >compressed attachments for them and then let them scan the unpacked
> >files. Has anybody written such hack or his own antivirus wrapper?
>
> All the decent anti-virus programs unpack every common archive format
> already. If your scanning engine doesn't unpack archives, then I suggest
> you buy a better one :-)
> You are quite correct, MailScanner doesn't unpack archives (as it doesn't
> need to).
> --
> Julian Field
> www.MailScanner.info
> MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support

To be honest, even those decent antivirus programs aren't perfect.
The majority of the programs are black boxes, you just believe that
it works. MailScanner is a nice program and maybe it would be nice
to have a separate layer for unpacking, where you can control for
example the nesting depth and prevent various DoS attacks. Then you
just keep the unpacking utilities up-to-date. I'm surprised that
nobody has attempted to program such thing.

Regards,
Michal Kminek