> Are virus scanners with IMail server necessary?
That mostly depends on whether or not viruses passing through your mail
server are acceptable. For some people it is, for some it isn't.
> I don't use any and never had any kind of virus problems.
You don't think you have any virus problems because you don't run the virus
scanners. <G>
> I understand that viruses can't be harmful because a mail server just
passes through
> the emails to the recipients. When do viruses come alive with Imail?
> Or are scanners just doing a favor to the mail recipients by not passing to
> them any viruses?
That's the key. The big issue with viruses is that if you have a virus
scanner on the mail server that scans the E-mail, you will help prevent
viruses being spread to your users, as well as to other users.
It is extremely unlikely that an E-mail virus would affect your IMail
server. In order for that to happen, you would need to actually run the
program containing the virus. That's not usually easy to do, as it would
need to be decoded first. The main exception would be if you used web
messaging and viewed an HTML file that contained a worm (such as Kak).
The main need for E-mail virus scanning is for your users (who are likely
either employees at your company, or customers; in either case, virus
scanning is a good thing), and for the people they send E-mail to (if you
have employees sending out viruses, you could easily lose business from the
companies you send them to).
Most mail servers do have viruses pass through them every day. Some people
have dozens/hundreds per day, others may only have one every couple of
days. The problem is that you may not realize that you have viruses
passing through your server if you aren't protected against them.
-Scott
Declude: Anti-spam and Anti-virus solutions for IMail. http://www.declude.com
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