How would I go about scanning my email for viruses?
While viruses on Linux are generally requiring special privileges to run, one could still be sending an email from Linux with an attachment that could be affected by a virus, which would then spell doom for Windows users. To make things simpler, here is how you can scan your email for viruses.
Requirements
You need to have ClamAV running in automated mode. Installing the clamav-daemon package provides this. See the ClamAV documentation for more information about this.
You will also need to add the following lines to /etc/clamav/clamd.conf:
TCPsocket 3310 TCPAddr localhost
Once you've made such changes, restart ClamAV:
sudo service clamav-daemon restart
=== Using ClamAV from Thunderbird == Scanning email for viruses in Thunderbird will require installing the Clamdrib extension. Once the extension has been installed you can test if its communicating with the ClamAV installation by going to Tools > Add-ons > clamdrib > Preferences > Test Settings.
See below for instructions on how to test if you virus scanning works.
For more information see this Thunderbird Virus Scan thread.
Scanning email for viruses in Evolution
Testing your email virus-scanning setup
- # Install clamav-testfiles # Email your account any of t/usr/share/clamav-testfiles
- /usr/share/clamav-testfiles/clam.cab
- /usr/share/clamav-testfiles/clam.exe
- /usr/share/clamav-testfiles/clam.exe.bz2
- /usr/share/clamav-testfiles/clam-v2.rar
- /usr/share/clamav-testfiles/clam-v3.rar
- /usr/share/clamav-testfiles/clam.zip