Gmail Has Launched Antivirus Service your mail is now scanned for viruses

[finaldesign1405241487 0]

Hi!

I saw this today when checking my emails, Gmail has launched today Virus Scanning service, so all you users of Gmail, you are now protected from viruses...
Note: You can't even send a message with attachment if Gmail find a virus inside that attachment, until you remove infected attachment. So it's once again: supreme'n'secure and the best of all it's free. Here is a link to gmail What's new page

[organicbmx 0]

do people trust gmail now? i really love mine, pop3 and smpt for free is so good and with a @gmail.com its just sounds good. nice to see antivirus at their end now on email.my friend was sceptical at first becasue of all the spying allegations but now he has just been won over by spec.

[minnieadkins 0]

I've had a gmail acount for about half a year now, and it's been nice thus far. Glad to see they continue to update their services and are prepared to remain in the top provider's of free email accounts.

[szupie 0]

If a virus is found in an attachment you've received, our system will attempt to remove it, or clean the file, so you can still access the information it contains. If the virus can't be removed from the file, you won't be able to download it.

I don't think that is a very good idea. If gmail is somehow wrong about the virus, or if you do want to download the virus (maybe to test if it works? ), you wouldn't be able to download the virus. I think they should make multiple confirm screens to scare off the people who are not sure about downloading viruses, but still let the experts download them.

[Sarah81 0]

Hi!

 

I saw this today when checking my emails, Gmail has launched today Virus Scanning service, so all you users of Gmail, you are now protected from viruses...

Note: You can't even send a message with attachment if Gmail find a virus inside that attachment, until you remove infected attachment. So it's once again: supreme'n'secure and the best of all it's free. Here is a link to gmail What's new page 

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Wow. I'm surprised that Gmail didn't already have some sort of virus scan in place. I'm glad that they're improving the e-mail service, though - every time they add something new, or improve something they've already introduced, Yahoo! Mail (the one I use) is forced to at least consider improving their service as well *grins*

[hatim 0]

since i use linux ..i dont care about viruses ..and even if i do get some virus ..and i am sending it via gmail...i should be allowed to send it out..i mean warn me all u want ..but dictating what i can send and waht i cannot send is not good.i appreciate the effort where google wants to curb destructive and criminal activities..but lets say ..if gmail were to dominate email in coming years. and it doent let people send things like music and vidoes , and encrypted documents (well you can always fool the system..but the system can always be atleast two stpes behind..and not let the general population do stuff) ..i think google should reverse theri decession ..and just warn about viruses.

[saxsux 0]

Does this new antivirus thing apply to Google Mail too, or is it just GMail?

I looked on the Google Mail "What's News?" page and there doesn't seem to be anything there about it - http://www.gmail.com/intl/en-GB/mail/help/about.html

 

This does look quite interesting, although I don't like the idea of not be able to download attachments. I think that GMail should just give a very prominent warning that what you're downloading is likey to cause damage to your computer, etc

Hopefully they'll change this if/when (assuming they haven't yet) they roll this out into the UK.

[Quatrux 4]

Well it is really good that they made this virus scan thing and it wants that people wouldn't be able to send virus/spam from their smpt server that people would not want to block incomming messages from the server, for example yahoo is blocked in many places.. I just would like that the invite system could stay forever.. if someone wants to send a virus, use a different smpt server

[yordan 10]

I didn't even notice that antivirus feature in gmail. Simply reading the present post, I went to the "about gmail" creen and saw that the antivirus feature was simply announced among all the other ones.

[nightfox1405241487 0]

Hi!

 

I saw this today when checking my emails, Gmail has launched today Virus Scanning service, so all you users of Gmail, you are now protected from viruses...

Note: You can't even send a message with attachment if Gmail find a virus inside that attachment, until you remove infected attachment. So it's once again: supreme'n'secure and the best of all it's free. Here is a link to gmail What's new page 

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It is a nice feature, but Yahoo! Mail wins in the "Anti-Virus" category, and Gmail gets an "D-".

Yahoo will allow you to send .exe files, even if they are in a ZIP file to begin with. If the EXE was a virus, Yahoo! Mail (using Norton AntiVirus) would delete it from the email. Now if it was a regular non-virus program, it would be permitted to be sent.

 

Gmail on the other hand is being "way over protective". I work a lot in Visual Basic .NET and I like to give my friends betas of software I have written. Gmail is my primary email client, but since they block ALL exe's (without even scanning them) I have to have my friends download the EXE or waste a CD and burn it on it for them. Gmail should just unblock all EXEs and actually scan them to be a better service. It's the only reason why I don't like Gmail.

 

[N]F

[yordan 10]

If it simply blocks the .exe files, rename your file.exe as file.brol, send it in a gmail mail and tell your friend to rename file.brol to file.exe !

[bachdot 0]

Hi!

 

I saw this today when checking my emails, Gmail has launched today Virus Scanning service, so all you users of Gmail, you are now protected from viruses...

Note: You can't even send a message with attachment if Gmail find a virus inside that attachment, until you remove infected attachment. So it's once again: supreme'n'secure and the best of all it's free. Here is a link to gmail What's new page 

1064331818[/snapback]

Do you have to download anything to have the virus scanner be effective?

bachdot

[sparx 0]

Now that all the hub bub seems to have died down, I'd like to make one small point - No one yet knows what sort of antivirus solution GMail is supposedly using. Certainly not one of the more commercial ones or else they'd more likely have advertised it as a USP. Knowing Google and its strong support for FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), I wouldn't be in the least surprised if they employed ClamWin or some other similar solution.If anyone comes across any article or info on GMail's antivirus provider please post it here. Quite eager to know who's cleaning up GMail.

[yordan 10]

I wouldn't be in the least surprised if they employed ClamWin or some other similar solution.

ClamWin seems not to have any on-access scanner facilities. You have to manually scan the files. So, i would say it can not be naturally used for non-outlook mail testing.

[kaputnik 0]

I think it's a jolly good idea for Google to scan e-mails for viruses during upload / download. If specialists want to get hold of a virus to evaluate it, they'd just as easily search it down through a P2P network; lols, infact, all it takes now-a-days to attract viruses is to just leave a computer online without a firewall - and kawablammm... you're hosting a computer well and truely infected. Gmail, is doing the general populance a really good deed by not allowing e-mail attachments with viruses that it detects. This would also really draw potential users to rely more and more, since they'd be able to trust them to tranfer all e-mails without any malacious attachments.