Travis Crump wrote:

> I hope you also filed a bug with the InnoculateIT people since this
> definitely seems like the fault of the Antivirus software.  Antivirus
> programs like Norton protect e-mail by downloading the email through an
> antiviral proxy so that it is scanned before it is passed to the e-mail
> program.  Since InnoculateIT actively blocks Mozilla from portions of
> their website, I doubt they do this, but instead they just scan all
> files being writen to the hard disk.  The problem with this approach is
> that by the time the virus attachment is being written to the harddrive,
> it is already part of the file Inbox like all other e-mail messages(this
> is the standard of storing e-mail).  Then InnoculateIT goes, "file Inbox
> has the BadTrans virus, lets delete the whole file so the user isn't
> infected, oops there goes all your e-mail".  I am sure you have already
> tried this, but if not, check InnoculateIT's list of quarintine files
> for the lost Inboxes..

I tried hunting that kind of stuff down.  InnoculateIT doesn't quite work 
the same way Norton does, and I am aware of the process Norton uses.  There 
is no proxy involved in this case.

I should also mention that InnoculatIT does not block Mozilla out. The 
product changed hands and is no longer a free download.  Those pages are 
simply no longer there.  The new vendor's web site renders perfectly in 
Mozilla.

https://www1.my-etrust.com/services/ipe_support?

As it is, this brings up a larger issue which should be squarely in 
Mozilla's lap.  For example, Eudora strips an attachment from an E-Mail, 
puts it into an attachments folder on the hard drive, then stores the body 
of the mail and a pointer to the file in the inbox.  The anti-virus 
software never gets involved with the actual mail folders as they contain 
nothing but plain text.  This is the way it should be.

Mind you, I have zero evidence at this point that the glitch was due to the 
anti-virus software.  The first wipe out had gotten a virus warning, the 
second displayed nothing.  Even for the sake of argument that it was the AV 
glitching out, Mozilla should be aware of how other software may interact 
with it, in much the same way Eudora is.  There is simply no reasonable way 
that every AV vendor out there can account for every possible mail client, 
and the same is true the other way around.  Stripping the attachments out 
as a step 1 is the only reasonable solution for this.

To further beat a dead horse, this is also a huge usability issue for 
everyone that I've set up E-Mail for.  I get asked all the time about how 
to delete an attachment and still keep the message body.  To me, this is no 
longer just a usability issue.

Worse still, I can't honestly say if this problem has anything to do with 
attachments in the first place.  The second wipe out occurred by simply 
switching folders, and since Moz does not remember the last message being 
viewed in a folder, what should have been displayed would have been either 
blank or the Mail/News web page.

Later on,
-- 
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too 
dark to read."
 - Groucho Marx

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