Using the AVG Personal Email Scanner (AVG EMS) with POPFile

The Free Edition of AVG Anti-Virus v7 includes a Personal email scanner plugin which scans incoming and outgoing emails automatically. This plugin can be used with email clients which do not have a dedicated AVG plugin, such as Outlook Express (AVG 7 has dedicated email plugins for Outlook, The BAT! and Eudora).

If you use Outlook, The BAT! or Eudora you can use the AVG Personal email scanner (AVG EMS) plugin instead of the dedicated plugin since this will make it easier to set up the proxy chain.

By default AVG EMS operates in fully automatic mode (i.e. it operates as a transparent email proxy and passes along requests from your email client to your email server). In this mode AVG EMS sets up two automatic servers, one checking outgoing email on port 25 and one checking incoming email on port 110.

This is similar to the way in which Norton Anti-Virus (NAV) scans email so these notes are based upon the NAV instructions

To use POPFile and AVG EMS together, do the following:

AVG EMS should operate between your email server (e.g. pop.your_isp.com) and POPFile like so:

This allows AVG EMS to check incoming messages for viruses before they reach POPFile or your mail client.

• Note that before installing POPFile, the mail client contains the following entries:

  pop3 server: pop.isp.net
  username: user

  • where pop.isp.net is your mail server, user is your login name.
  • Generally the port for the mail server is specified elsewhere in your mail client and 110 is the most common setting.

• AVG EMS will pass along requests from your mail client to pop.isp.net at port 110. As a transparent proxy, AVG EMS can intercept incoming or outgoing communication with email server to check for virus threats depending on how you choose to configure AVG EMS. Checking both incoming and outgoing traffic is the recommended default setting.

• By default the free version of AVG EMS adds a few lines of text to the end of each incoming and outgoing message to show that the message has been scanned for viruses (so it is easy to confirm that you have configured it properly). You can use the AVG Control Center to enable/disable or change these extra lines of text.

• Install POPFile ( Windows installations)
• Using http://127.0.0.1:8080/configuration, set the POPFile listen port to 123 leave the POP3 host:port:user separator character as a colon :.
• Change the mail client's setup as follows:

  pop3 server: 127.0.0.1
  username: pop.isp.net:110:user
  pop3 port: 123

• The above setup tells the mail client to contact POPFile on IP address 127.0.0.1 and port 123.
• POPFile will examine the username and strip off the left side of the username (where the : is the division point), and use that to contact the virus scanner on 127.0.0.1 port 110, and pass the rest to the virus scanner as the username. If your email server requires an unusual port for receiving email, you can replace 110 with the appropriate port.
• Just like it did before POPFile was installed, AVG EMS will use the email username to contact the real mail server on port 110.

Note:

• If SSL connections are required to access your email then AVG EMS's automatic mode cannot be used and AVG EMS has to be manually configured.

• AVG 8.5 FAQ 1286: How to create servers for scanning e-mails - SSL communication

• AVG 7.5 FAQ 677: How to create servers for scanning e-mails - SSL communication

• AVG 7.5 Free Edition Support Forum (email scanning section)

See also:

• Configure Specific Mail Clients on the How Tos page
• Message board