On 25 Dec 2001, at 16:07, Clyde W. Burns wrote:

>    I then tried my mail again with the same results as before. At
> that point I said to heck with it,disabled the email-protection and
> downloaded the messages, deleted the offending one and everything
> worked fine. I also ran the virus scan again with no virus being
> shown. Can someone tell me what happened and what to do if it
> happens again. I suspect I got some bad advice which cost me with
> no results. I probably did not word this too well as I am not very
> tech-minded. Thanks!

  I think this was actually the correct course of action.

  With email-protection enabled, the antivirus was detecting the
virus so soon that the email program thought the message download had
failed.  So it never told the server that the message could be
deleted, and it was still there and available the next time you tried
to download mail.

  It's hard to have a right answer for this that works in every case.
 There are half a dozen common email programs out there, and perhaps
another dozen less common -- it's hard to make an antivirus that will
work correctly with every one of them in every possible
configuration.

> I recently checked my mail and got a virus warning from Norton
> virus protection, I did what was suggested, quarintine,etc. and

  IF you use Outlook, AND IF this had been one of the viruses that
can infect just from a preview of the message, AND IF the infected
message was the first/only waiting message, THEN quarantine might be
the only safe choice here.  But if any of these is not true, then it
would probably have been fairly safe to choose "ignore", and deal
with the virus more-or-less manually after the download was complete
(as you effectively did, eventually).

David Gillett

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