Avast WEBforum
Consumer Products => Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security (legacy Pro Antivirus, Internet Security, Premier) => Topic started by: timothy345 on August 12, 2019, 06:34:06 PM
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Hello! I have a question about the Email Shield protection of Avast Internet Security. I figure it would be very helpful for it to scan attachments of emails in my inbox but I am confused by what the Shield actually does and I am worried that it could delete an email as a false positive for a phrase in the body of the email text itself. So I am wondering - what parts of an email does the Mail Shield scan? Does it only scan attachments or does it scan the email's text itself or the subject heading or anything else?
Thank you! :)
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See if this helps you:
https://help.avast.com/en/av_free/17/settings_sh_mail_basic.html (https://help.avast.com/en/av_free/17/settings_sh_mail_basic.html)
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Hello! I have a question about the Email Shield protection of Avast Internet Security. I figure it would be very helpful for it to scan attachments of emails in my inbox but I am confused by what the Shield actually does and I am worried that it could delete an email as a false positive for a phrase in the body of the email text itself. So I am wondering - what parts of an email does the Mail Shield scan? Does it only scan attachments or does it scan the email's text itself or the subject heading or anything else?
Thank you! :)
To all intents and purposed scanning text content or the subject in an email would be pointless (for an anti-virus application) as text or a phrase isn't malicious as such. Anti Spam applications would be more inclined to look for subject or text content to categorise it as spam, etc. These spam emails would probably also contain external links, which may not be scanned by an anti-spam program (see note below).
What is potentially harmful are external links to sites or images (which can be hacked) or worse still command content such as iFrames. These should/would be scanned.
As you mention, attachments would most certainly be scanned.
Note: I use such an anti-spam program to pre-scan my mail and filter out and or delete from the mail server, before even downloading the remainder of the emails, they would subsequently be scanned by Avast. Not that avast has ever found anything after I have pre-scanned/filtered out only good emails remain.