I had a new client sign up today.  First thing they did was use this free e-mail security check.  I will not post the name of the company, since I don't want to promote them.  Google it, and you will find it if you want to run the test.

Anyway, they send 7 messages to any email address you want.

They test several things:

- Ability to stop SPAM, based on GTUBE signature.
- Ability to stop VIRUSES, based on EICAR signature.

- Ability to block a series of 5 different attachments, which is basically a BAT file I think.

Unfortunately, Spam Filter does not perform so well out of the box.  In order to pass any of the tests you need to:

1) Add a keyword filter on the GTUBE signature (we have done that now)
2) Have antivirus feature enabled (the only test of 7 that worked for us)
3) Add file attachment blacklists (will only help slightly)

Now, not everyone needs or wants to block file attachments - so the test just assumes you want to be doing that.  Fare enough.

What is interesting is they send the batch file as a 'normal' attachment.  If you have a filter on *.bat it gets blocked.

However they also send the same file in four additional messages containing the attachment disguised in different ways.  Even if you have *.bat or *.exe, Spam Filter fails to stop the attachments.

They got through to my inbox, and my email client does recognize the attachments as .bat files and throws up a warning message.

I certainly got embarrassed when the new client contacted me, with 6 of 7 email security tests failing through our system.

Was the issue of these messages getting past spamfilter ever resolved?  I continue to see new clients testing our system and the virus messages still go through from the looks of it.

I recently had a customer bring the same concerns...

I was the original poster of this last year.  I just ran the test again, against a domain protected by spamfilter and to a gmail account.

The testing service sends 7 messages, just like they did last year.  I tested gmail first.

gmail allowed 3/7, 6/7 and 7/7 through.

My spamfilter did better than a year ago, but strangely the virus test got through to my outlook client.

So spamfilter did not stop 2/7 and 4/7.  2/7 is the test virus, which my system should be stopping as I have the virus module.  I will do some more testing, and as Roberto mentioned above 4/7 is still a known issue.

We were able to duplicate this issue. There appears to have been a regression error with the new SpamFilter v4.5.x that removed the fix that was added in SpamFilter v4.1.2.813. We'll have this re-fixed shortly.

RBarrow,