305354 - Have an option to specify a file extension for local mailboxes to allow exclusion from antivirus programs.

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Backend, enhancement)

Description

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User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

There is a serious, and in my opinion, unfixed problem where virus scanners will
quarantine a mailbox if it contains a virus.  Granted this is not a problem in
Thunderbird, but steps should be taken to mitigate this issue since it is
unlikely that antivirus companies are going to start supporting the mbox file
format.

Current history is here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116443

The current solution is save incoming messages to a temp file so that they can
be scanned before entering the mailbox.  This doesn't fix the problem, because
mailboxes will still be quarantined if a virus slips through (an event which
will always occur given enough time).

A, in my opinion, better solution would be to allow the addition of a file
extension to mailboxes which could then be used in the file extension exclusion
list for a virus checker.  For example I could add .pst (which many scanners
excluded anyway to prevent this from happening to outlook).  This is
particularly true for centralized management where excluding directories is
prohibitive because the mail directory changes on every client machine.

It is my belief that this issue is very serious because it severely hampers
deployment for corporate environments.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Put a virus in an incoming mailbox.
2.  Run virus checker.

Actual Results:  
Mailbox gets quarantined.

Expected Results:  
Allowed me to add a file extension to mailboxes which could then be used the
file exclusion list in an antivirus scanner.