By Will Sturgeon, 11 May 2004 16:25
NEWS Symantec has shown the way for other antivirus firms to finally end the proliferation of false user email notifications, which wrongly identity the source of a virus and add to the general email deluge swamping users' inboxes.
Users who remain uninfected by computer viruses still often see a huge increase in email traffic as they are inundated with notifications resulting from spoofed email addresses in the 'from:' field that wrongly tell them they've sent a virus when, generally, it is in fact somebody whose address book that they appear in that has been infected.
Some users have been getting so frustrated at the high numbers of such emails that they have been dubbed "as annoying as spam", according to Greg Day, solutions architect at rival antivirus firm McAfee.
Symantec said concerns about system resources and storage as well as employee productivity played a major part in the planning of the product.
During peaks of malware activity, users can receive hundreds of such emails per day but now the latest iteration of the Symantec's SMTP email security solution not only claims to remove the malware but also does away with the bandwidth-sapping, inbox-cluttering email notifications.
McAfee's Day is confident that all major antivirus companies will follow suit -- including his own. However, he added that many corporate customers "as an interim measure have already turned off user alerts".
"It's something we will do with each relevant product as soon as possible," Day told silicon.com, adding that he expects every major antivirus vendor to do likewise, citing vocal end-user frustration at the messages.
Comments
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1. anonymous
Thank God for that! I'm so tired of getting these messages - as far as I am concerned these are spam. I have a mailbox set up to receive (and repy to) enquiries from my website - these are usually about 5-6 messages a week - yet I get dozens of undeliverable or virus notification messages a day.
Lynda
2. Adrian Lee
About time, I've taken to replying to some of those annoying messages and telling the systems admins to turn it off or risk their domain being banned by our Exchange Server.
I've had grief from users and my bosses, concerned that they are getting emails saying we are infected with a virus when we are not.
I wish AV companies would do away with the useless bit of text they add to email saying something "Varified virus free by xxx". Wow, that means so much, it's far to easy to fake that as well.
3. Rob Kelley
Viruses have 2 pay loads, the code and the amount of crapy emails they generate, symantec are right to stop auto replies.
I own and run an AV system and it just drops any infected emails and no replies to the spoofed sender.
4. Bod
I agree with Rob, it doesn't take the brain of Britain to realise that most infected Emails are from spoofed addresses. I set my system up to drop infected mails from the start, I just wish that other admins/sysops would show the same courtesy.