How do you setup Sophos AV Mac Home Edition to scan all OUTGOING emails automatically?

I'll play around and see if I can come up with a script for that... MacHomeAV doesn't do this by default (just on access) -- but both Sophos Anti-Virus and Mail.app are fully applescriptable, so it shouldn't be too difficult to set up a mail action that calls SAV to scan the message.  Remind me if I don't post a solution in here in the next few days :)

Whoaa great! I can not wait to try it out and spread the message that I'm a Sophos user! :D

Thank you Andrew ;)

Well, I think I found a simple solution, directly from my response here:

http://openforum.sophos.com/t5/Sophos-Anti-Virus-for-Mac-Home/How-to-scan-only-certain-folders/m-p/1201#M674

Navigate to ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Outbox.mbox/ in the Finder

Right/Control click on the Messages folder.

Follow the instructions from the message thread linked above, and any item to be mailed will be scanned.  Of course, there's a possibility that Mail.app will successfully send it before the scan starts; haven't tried that yet.

Then you just need to modify your signature to include "Scanned by Sophos Anti-Virus Mac Home Edition http://www.sophos.com/products/free-tools/free-mac-anti-virus/" or something similar :)

I know there's a more elegant way to do it by scripting Mail.app itself, but I haven't figured it out yet.  Pester me and I might put some more time into it :)  Otherwise, enjoy!

(Incidentally, this is somewhat useless if you're using on-access scanning, as in that case anything in this folder is already being scanned before it is sent.  You can save yourself some time by just adding the signature to your mail prefs)

You can test both methods by attempting to email eicar.com to yourself :)

Andrew,

thanks for the very quick response! Honestly I have not so familiar with the term "on-access" in Sophos AV. Is that mean if I enable the on-access scanner so every in and out files will be scanned (including email)?

Thank you Andrew!

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Scanned by Sophos Anti-Virus Mac Home Edition

http://www.sophos.com/

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NanoG5 wrote:

Andrew,

thanks for the very quick response! Honestly I have not so familiar with the term "on-access" in Sophos AV. Is that mean if I enable the on-access scanner so every in and out files will be scanned (including email)?

Thank you Andrew!

----

Scanned by Sophos Anti-Virus Mac Home Edition

http://www.sophos.com/

---

"On access" means that the file is "scanned" whenever it is accessed.  If it has not changed since it was last scanned, I believe it is not scanned again.

Because of the changes Apple made to Mail.app back around 10.4/10.5 to make it Spotlight-friendly, it is also SAV friendly; each email is saved as a file to the Outbox mailbox folder prior to sending, and is then read back by Mail.app to send to the mail server.

Both saving and reading are "access," so the message gets scanned before it goes out when "On Access" is enabled.  Safari does similar things for similar reasons, so web pages in Safari get scanned too.  Firefox caches some stuff in memory, so it doesn't get scanned until it is written back to disk (either when the memory cache fills up, or when something acctually attempts disk access).

OK thank you Andrew, I understand now! ;)