Avast! in conjunction with Opera 7.5 - what can it do for me?

[Clemens_1]

Hello!

While installing Acast!, I had to set up it like a POP3 / SMTP-Mail-Server or proxy. So I made the conclusion, that all e-mail-traffic would have to pass Avast, then the data would be scanned "on the fly while passing", bad Mails would be sent in quarantine folder or would be deleted and only the good ones would pass to the e-mail client like Opera M2.

From some statements in the Opera user forum I heard, that they had Avast running and they have found e-mails with viruses or trojans in the attaches. So Avast would have let them pass by unscanned. Avast caused alarm only then, when the attachment was tried to be opened.

But this alarm would then not be a typical e-mail-security-function but the general scanning function of Avast which looks at executables and scripts which would be going to be started.

Please can anybody here tell me exactly, how Avast will give me security when using Opera 7.5 together with their M2 e-mail- and news-client?

Clemens

[rloschmann]

Their proxy settings and the mail client settings were certainly not right !!!

To be sure the incoming mails are scanned you can insert a clean note or check the last scanned item in the e-mail resident scanner.

[Clemens_1]

Ah! You again, le doc!

Yes, I will follow you in the assumption, that they did not set up Avast! corrrectly. It seems, that they have missed the best from Avast and did run it without any proxy-facilities.
By this it would be clear, why an infectious e-mail could pass and it would be detected by Avast only at that point, where they tried to open that attachment which came with the mail.

I think I will do some explanations in the Opera discussion forum. Meanwhile I am also fan of Avast! because of its clear conceptional superiority!

But the script-blocker for Opera-Browser should be added to Avast!
Further they should think about wether it would be usefull, to extend the proxy facilities to NNTP protocol also in order to give more security in newsgroups.

I think, Opera itself is superior to other solutions, because it simply has no WSH-facilities built in. So Scripting is very limited. Further auto-popup can be disabled. To make Opera more safe, you only need to watch / scan  Javascripting.
The same is true for the e-mail and newsgroup-traffic. They have no HTML-engine in it, so you simply can send only "text only".
Receiving HTML and interpreting this is limited in Opera but in this field I am still not very good informed.

All in all I would say, that Opera is more safe than Netscape 7.*

Clemens

[rloschmann]

I prefere Mozilla.

Long living to open source !!!