How do sites like Yahoo scan email attachments?

Aaron Edwards · May 10th, 2005, 07:54 PM

Hi All,

What do sites like Yahoo and Hotmail use to scan attachments for viruses? I need something like that on one of my clients' sites.

Aaron

katsarosj · May 10th, 2005, 08:46 PM

I believe Yahoo uses Symantec and Hotmail uses Trend Micro.

Aaron Edwards · May 11th, 2005, 12:46 AM

Do those programs expose APIs that can be accessed progametically, e.g. in an ASP.NET upload handler or ISAPI filter?

Aaron

katsarosj · May 11th, 2005, 08:42 AM

I don't know. You may have to contact the companies and ask them.

planoie · May 11th, 2005, 09:19 AM

If your web server is set up with the virus scan software such that any file write activity gets scanned then any file written to the server disk by the upload code would get scanned. So I guess as long as you have a virusscanning package installed you can say that your attachments are "Scanned by xxx".

-Peter

Aaron Edwards · May 11th, 2005, 09:29 AM

Hi,

Thanks for the responses.

Yahoo and Hotmail's scanners tell you immediately if your upload is clean or infected, so I figure their web app must be able to communicate directly with the virus scanning software. There is this thing out there called the Virus Scanning API developed by Microsoft for Exchange servers. I'm not sure if it can be used on a web server, and I don't know whose antivirus actually complies with it. Anyone know anything about this?

Aaron

Palanisamy · May 25th, 2005, 06:54 AM

Hi All,
We could scan the files during upload by using command line EXE's.
McAfee is providing this s/w. We could call this exe from ASP.NET / VB.
But, I 'm not sure this would feasible solution.

Any alternate for this?

Thanks,
PS