General information regarding email virus, SPAM and security
There are many myths and misunderstandings surrounding email security, virus and spam. However one thing is certain, virus and spam are a great nuisance and cost companies a lot of money every day.
Security and the ‘From address’
The problem is, very simplified of course, mostly related to the ‘from address’ of the email standards in use today. There is nothing stopping you putting a ‘from address’ on your emails that you don’t control or have access to. This is what spammers and virus emails use to make the email seem more trustworthy to unsuspecting users. This, in other words, means that you have absolutely no guaranties of who send an email to you.
Scanning for virus’s and SPAM Since the 14. December 2001 all emails are scanned that pass through our servers, for both virus’s and SPAM (unwanted ad emails) and the user is informed if such an email is tested positive for one of these conditions. Common for both of these installations is to make it safer to read emails. The procedures are however different when a virus or spam email is detected. See below for details on each condition: Virus: If a virus is detected by the scanner it twill be deleted immediately and both sender and recipient are notified. Please notice that there are a series of file types that is not allowed to be send as attached files to your emails, simply because of the inherent danger of them being an undetectable virus carrier. Therefore emails with the following file types attached are deleted as it is seen as a virus: .SCR .PIF .VBS .SHS .EXE .COM .BAT .HTA .CPL If you do need to send a file of one of the types listed above, please compress it into a zip file before sending it. SPAM: All emails are subject to at least 10 different analyses in the attempt to identify whether or not it is SPAM, but unlike virus it is not so easily identifiable. This means that emails that isn’t SPAM could easily be identified as such. Therefore it is not deleted like a virus, it is simply labelled with a clear indication (the first part of the subject is ‘SPAM: ’) in the subject line. This makes it possible to filter the emails and move them to a special folder, so that if you are contacted about you not responding to an email, you can look through the spam folder and it will most likely be there. Please notice however that this also means you need to delete the unwanted emails by hand!