> > How can an anti-virus program scan a file for viruses *before*
> > the file is downloaded? I have never heard of any virus scanning
> > software having such a feature.
L.D. Best replied:
> I have ... but it is run by the ISP at the POP3 server level.
> X-AntiVirus: scanned for viruses by AMaViS 0.2.1 (http://amavis.org/)
> The above line appears in every piece of mail I download from my ISP's
> POP3. Occasionally I receive a bot-mail stating that "the X virus was
> found in e-mail addressed to you from {fill in the blank}. The message
> has been deleted.
Actually, if I was worried about viruses more, I could do as L.D. Best
suggests. I have a shell account and can download mail or browser
files to the ISP shell and run a virus program there before downloading
them to my PC. It would be fairly easy to automate this with shell
scripts, since I already use my shell machine as an intermediate
kind of ``cache'' in my automated downloads from browsers or mailers.
Have I not heard of software that can check a compressed archive
for viruses before decompressing it?
In any case I have thus far not heard of a virus in a file that
can do damage just be being downloaded to your PC, before it is
executed or opened for reading. As there such viruses?
