Hi,

I like the ClamWin and the ClamMail programs too. The ClamWin program would put an implement onto a big benefit if it would integrate the ClamMail functions (e-mail scanning 'on the fly') - while we wait for the on-access scanning component.

I would welcome of full solution (in the future: spyware infection, registry protection, firewall features, web and e-mail suspected script scanning in realtime). - There is a wishlist forum topic? :-)

Bests,

Gabor Nagy

I've also been an enthusiastic user of ClamWin for a while now. I thought the ClamMail project was inactive. There are only two developers working on ClamWin, and they do so in their spare time, so they can't take on too much. Except for porting the normal Clam updates over to ClamWin, everything is geared to developing the real-time version 1.0. There is supposed to be a very early alpha version, but they are having trouble using the real-time scanning filter driver.

If you have programming skills and some free time and would like to help, contact them--there is contact information on the Clamwin home page. They also need other help, so contact them if you have some time.

Regards,

Clammail's last release was from February 6, 2006, and there's not much activity on the forums since that time.

Does anyone have experience with that project ?

Would it be a good idea to upgrade it to latest clam version and bundle it with ClamWin ?

I haven't fetched the code so i'm not sure how the proxy is implemented, but maybe i could take a look at it. This would allow email scanning for all POP3 email clients.

regards,
budtse

Do you have to change the code in Clamwin to accommodate each individual email program? Some of the commercial antivirus programs claim they can work with several different email programs as long as they meet certain standards (POP3 or MAPI?). Looks to me like they are all doing basically the same things, so perhaps you could "set and forget" the bulk of the email accommodation code in ClamWin and not have to worry about it any more--for those emails meeting the standards.

Regards,

I've talked about it with oiaohm on the #clamwin IRC channel today.

It seems that the best way would be that the Email client software provides the option to stream incoming emails to an AV before it makes them available to the user. Kontakt (on KDE) provides this functionality, but other clients like Thunderbird or Outlook Express don't.

An other way is to use a Proxy like ClamMail which should work for all POP3 email clients. I'm not sure if this solution is as good as the previous one. Spammato uses the same method, but it doesn't seem to be very stable to my experience.

A third way - the way the clamwin outlook plugin works - is to catch the attachments before they are loaded in a reading pane and scan them at that time. This method requires a specific plugin for each email client though.

It seems like the email developers could make things a little easier for the AV--perhaps you should contact them and see if they could provide you with plugin, etc. I guess a lot of the AVs go the proxy/POP3 route.

On the other hand, many personal PC users (like moi) use a service/ISP for email instead of running their own email client. The service takes care of viruses (hopefully) and spam, so the need for a personal AV to scan email files might diminish over time--remaining important mostly for businesses. Perhaps there could be a Clamwin-developed plug-in for paying business customers at some point. In that case, you don't want to give away too much. Although there is something that sounds "right" ClamWin about supporting other software with the "Clam" name, you might want to look at the number of email users. It seems to me that by supporting Outlook and Thunderbird, you might already be covering email pretty well.

Regards,

That takes me back to the TB plugin. I'm gonna have to do some studying on other TB plugins like Enigmail and Spammato, find out how they do their job.

On the ClamAV website, they say that Clam has support for almost all email formats. Do you think they might be of some help to you?

Regards,

In Thunderbird Options/Privacy/Anti-Virus there is a checkbox "Allow anti-virus clients to quarantine individual incoming messages". May be this could be used by ClamWin.