GMail Adds Virus Protection

AxsDeny writes "Google has rolled out virus protection for it's web based email service. Apparently they are scanning incoming and outgoing messages for infected messages. Read more on their "what's new" page."

Comments

Re:This could be a big issue

[Mr. Underbridge]

A lot of filters drop anything encrypted, for that reason.

Re:but what powers it?

[Leadhyena]

Wouldn't it be better for google to take the ClamAV base and extend/adapt it to their needs? I think that's more likely to happen than them starting from scratch unless there's something weird (aside from size) about the way their email system works.

Funny you should mention that... I read through the headers from an email I sent to our local mail server:(Identifiers mutated for spam reasons)

Received: from zproxy.gmail.com (zproxy.gmail.com [64.233.162.199]) by ###.###.### (8.13.5/8.13.5/Debian-3) with ESMTP id jB...5 for ; Thu, 1 Dec 2005 11:06:00 -0600 Received: by zproxy.gmail.com with SMTP id x7so21853nzc for ; Thu, 01 Dec 2005 09:06:48 -0800 (PST) DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:mime-ve rsion:content-type; b=DZ...SE/zJ0= Received: by 10.37.12.24 with SMTP id p24mr1718713nzi; Thu, 01 Dec 2005 09:06:48 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.36.153.11 with HTTP; Thu, 1 Dec 2005 09:06:47 -0800 (PST)

In other words, it looks like they have a cluster of 30 email servers for just the outside representation, and then 2 more levels of multiple clustered mail servers on the 10.37 subnet and 10.36 subnet. Your mail bounces in google's net 3 TIMES before it ever hits the real world. Granted, my experience in setting this stuff up is limited to clustering 2 or 3 servers together, but IMHO something amazing is going on under GMail's hood.

Re:Final Straw!

[Curunir_wolf]

What I hate is the way it refuses to send attached executables, even inside a zip file, and silently drops them when incoming. I'd at least like to be told that someone *tried* to send me an email, but the attachment was deleted, or bounce it back to the sender, or something.

The easy work-around for this is to just rename mypgm.exe to mypgm.renametoexe and then it goes through just fine (zipped or not). But if I'm sending it *TO* a gmail account, I don't even know it got dropped...