[Zsd-news] Virus Protection Upgrade

[I. Forbes]

Hello All

We have been busy with developments with our anti-virus protection 
system. Three significant new features have now been installed:


Notification of Rejected Viruses

Users will now be warned when an infected e-mail, addressed to them, 
was rejected by our e-mail server.  They will also be warned if their 
computer sent out an infected message (however some viruses obscure 
their origins, which prevents these messages reaching the intended 
recipient).


Protection against accidental execution of attached files.

The system detects many common viruses by examining the format of the 
e-mail messages, and files attached to those messages.  Many viruses 
include settings which are designed to exploit faults in common e-
mail programs but have no useful function in the e-mail.  These are 
detected and rejected.

However some messages contain a legitimate attached executable files 
which could have been sent either by a bona fide sender, or by an 
infected computer.  Normally the attachments will not be executed 
unless the user deliberately or inadvertently "double clicks" on the 
attachment.  

Unfortunately many unsuspecting users have double clicked on an 
executable attachment, and have been infected as a result of this.

We now offer protection against this form of infection as well.  Our 
system will automatically rename executable files attached to e-mail. 
Thus double clicking on them will have no effect.  

If you receive one of  these messages and you know who sent it to you 
and you may wish to execute the attachment.  You can do this by 
saving the attachment to your hard drive, and renaming it back to its 
original name, then executing it.  Before you do this, make 100% 
certain that you know who sent you the attachment and why and that 
the sender's computer is not infected with a virus.


Choice

It is inevitable that what is good for some users, will not be good 
for all of them.  If you would prefer to receive all of you e-mail, 
"as is" without the benefit (and side effects) of our virus filtering 
service, please e-mail "support@zsd.co.za" requesting that the 
protection be removed from your address.

We have the functionality to switch off virus protection on 
individual e-mail boxes where those boxes are hosted 
on our main mail server.  For customers who have mail forwarded to 
site based mail servers we must either 
enable, or disable protection for all mail sent to the site based 
server.


Regards

Ian Forbes

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Ian Forbes ZSD
http://www.zsd.co.za
Office: +27 21 683-1388  Fax: +27 21 674-1106
Snail Mail: P.O. Box 46827, Glosderry, 7702, South Africa
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