KMail Clamav antivirus check not working; alternatives?

[vesselinpeev]

Hello,

I'm running a fully updated (via up2date) Fedora Core 3 i386 on a Pentium 4. It is a stable, excellent, polished distribution.
Since I also have a Windows computer on the network and consider moving as much as I can to Fedora 3, I want to make sure that any Windows viruses do not creep in from the Linux side. For the moment, I would like to restrict dealing with e-mail to Fedora, and since I do not run my own mail server but use an external service that I access via POP3 over SSL or IMAP over SSL, I have searched for a way to use ClamAV to check for viruses in the MUA. I'm not biased towards Evolution or KMail or any other as long as it handles the abovementioned e-mail protocols well (KMail is flaky and slow on IMAP, btw., but that's not a big deal for now), and as long as it is GUI. I have found the following alternatives, but so far I was not successful in making use of them:

--KMail has an Antivirus Wizard which I set up to use ClamAV 0.8 (installed from Dag's repository). Since I knew I current had a mail with a virus attachment on the mail server, I used the Antivirus Wizard to specify that I want to use ClamaV and that all infected mail be moved into a local mail folder named "infected". It didn't work.

--KlamAV (http://klamav.sourceforge.net , not ClamAV) claims to handle things better (faster scanning among others), and has support for Evolution, too, but there is no RPM for Fedora, it is bundled with its own (now outdated) ClamAV, and as I read on the net some users have experienced problems running it under Fedora.
I have not tried it, but it has the bonus of on-access scanning by utilizing Dazuko (which also comes with ClamAV and messes with the kernel, so that's one more reason I want to avoid it unless it's in a tested RPM. By the way, Mandrake has a Klamav RPM).

Any clue why KMail's antivirus check does not run ClamAV? It's supposed to run "clamscan", which I can run manually as either a superuser or a restricted user without any problems. The virus in the infected e-mail attachment I mentioned previously is correctly recognized as such when I save it to a folder and run "clamscan" on the attachment manually.

Thank you in advance.

[Jman]

There is a clamav server, clamd, also available from dag. It should be faster, and also has a clamdscan client in place of clamscan.

[telmo]

i think you don't need that... (maybe i'm mistaken) fedora desn't have written permissions to ntfs partitions (if that's your case...)

Anyway... antivirus is always a good thing to have!

[vesselinpeev]

Thanks for the tip, Jman. So nobody got KMail Antivirus feature running?
I'll finally have to resort to a proxy, it seems, but I wouldn't want to unnecessarily.
Should I report the KMail Antivirus Wizard problem as a bug, I wonder?

[vesselinpeev]

Telmo, no, I don't worry about viruses accessing NTFS, but I need to be able to move mail between Linux/Win machines for development purposes (I'm coincidentally writing some software which might end up doing what I want here), but regardless, defense-in-depth is a good thing

[NotPasteurized]

F-Protect sounds like it could the job,
and clamav has a version in portable apps sweat that runs on win also so you can use it on other peoples systems.

[Hlingler]

Hello:

You are aware, I hope, that FC3 is long past end-of-life, so it is not surprising to me that some apps may not work correctly. KMail works just fine with clamav for me - on FC6 and F7. If you like having a back-up plan, yes, f-prot comes with a KMail plug-in that should be picked up by the KMail AV setup wizard. Note that f-prot needs manual set-up to get updates. Avoid Klamav and Dazuko.

Good Luck,
V

EDIT: I can't believe that I just answered a three-year-old post....