Today, we’re going to talk a little about how anti-virus programs like Norton Antivirus and McAffee Virus Scan work on your computer, and why the most common problem with email is caused by these programs malfunctioning.
When you set up one of these programs on your computer, they start a program that is always running. This program is designed to scan mail being sent to, or from your computer.
The way that this program works, is that it watches for any programs on your computer that request a connection to either an incoming or outgoing mail server, intercepts any communication that program is trying to send to that server, and then sends that communication on to the server after checking it for viruses.
The problem with this mechanism is twofold. First, the email program that you are using has no idea that this is happening, so if anything goes wrong with the process, your email program will believe that the mail server is causing the problem. Second, and most importantly, the email scanning program installed by Norton Antivirus or MacAfee VirusScan can frequently crash, or malfunction, especially when scanning messages with particularly large attachments.
There are only two ways to solve this problem. The first is to reinstall your antivirus software on your computer, assuming you have the disk for that. The second is to turn off the email scanning in your antivirus program, which can be risky, especially if you check email from a server that doesn’t scan incoming mail for viruses (InfoWest’s mail server does check for viruses).
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