E-Mail Headers

[billco]

Is there an AVAST! setting which will avoid the avast! messages in the header, e.g.?

X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS 080529-1, 05/29/2008), Outbound message
X-Antivirus-Status: Clean
X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS 080529-1, 05/29/2008), Inbound message
X-Antivirus-Status: Clean

[alanrf]

That tells you they have been scanned.

There is no way I know of to turn off these headers and have scanning active.  There is very little value in outbound scanning anyway so you can turn that off and avoid them in outgoing messages. 
 
Are they causing a problem?  Most will never see them. 

[Lisandro]

There is very little value in outbound scanning anyway

What about a spambot sending emails from your computer?

[alanrf]

I am not quite sure of your point Tech - sorry if I did not explain well. 

The antivirus scanning of outbound mail provides almost no value to the sender and no email recipient should believe or trust the outbound scanning information that is included in an email message. 

If a user has the misfortune to be infected by a spambot then avast will quite happily scan all the spam going out and say it contains no virus (since almost all of it does not) and even put the X-Antivirus headers in the spam. 

To the best of my knowledge if you tell the avast Internet Mail provider not to scan outbound mail (in the SMTP tab) and you have the sensitivity setting at High then avast will not scan the messages but the heuristics of the provider will still detect spambot mass mailings.

[Lisandro]

The heuristics of the provider will still detect spambot mass mailings.

I was referring to this... but does it (heuristic) work even if you disable the outbound scanning?

[alanrf]

I cannot see that there needs to any connection between scanning and counting. 

Perhaps we can get a yay or nay from the team.