Part of the firewall has a section for email...which I have turned off...but it has a very long list of extensions that it will not allow to be executed...should I turn that on or would that interfere with Avast! doing it's job?
thank you, my friends...
cojo
If you block the emails attachments into the firewall settings, probably you won't be able to
receive email with this extensions, they would remain in the server and avast! won't scan them because you won't even download them
Probably, I'm not sure, you won't be able to
send email with this extensions too.
For instance, when you turn on the option of Outlook Express to block emails with attachments, you could configure its behavior by the program Attachment Unblocker 1.0 (
http://www.hofnet.com/software). What is it? Melissa, Love letter, etc. are worms that use the scripting capabilities within Outlook to spread rapidly over the internet. In Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft has tightened up security to limit the effects of this new generation of viruses. This has been done by limiting the possibility to access file attachments that is considered unsafe. While it usually is a good idea to not open .vbs files that arrive in mail, there is times where one might want to. The same goes for .exe files and many other types of files that has been blocked in Outlook. This would be a very good thing if they had remembered to include some way to change this setting. But they seem to have forgotten about that. This is where AU (Attachment Unblocker) comes to use. AU can be used to temporarily or permanently unblock certain file types in Outlook. If someone sends you an e-mail with a VBScript (.vbs) attached to it that you know is not a virus and you would like to save the file to disk or run it, just unblock .vbs files and use the file as you wish. When you're done you could re-block .vbs files again if you wish. Note! AU should be used with caution. To unblock all files permanently completely disables this security feature in Outlook.
So, you can use either the Script Defender to prevent infections from emails (
http://www.analogx.com). You can block: .VBS,.VBE,.JS,.JSE,.HTA,.WSF,.WSH,.SHS,.SHB,.REG and any other extension that you want.
