Real-time Scanning

Real-time scanning for viruses is the most important job of every antivirus solution deployed on Exchange servers, and Avast Exchange Server Edition is no exception. Thanks to tight integration with the Exchange server itself, Avast is able to detect and remove viruses from both inbound and outbound messages. It does not matter how a message gets to/from the server - be it SMTP, MAPI, NNTP, IMAPI, POP, Outlook Web access (HTTP) or any other way - you can be confident that it will be properly screened and disinfected before it reaches the recipient. Scanning is of course not confined to mailboxes - public folders are monitored as well.

New for Exchange 2003 is the ability to operate at transport level - meaning that all items will be properly scanned even if deployed on a gateway/border server that just passes mails through, without saving them to the information store.

Proactive and background scanning

Avast offers more scanning options than just real-time scanning to ensure that your server is virus-free under all circumstances.

Proactive scanning means that whenever a message is submitted to the Exchange store, either by way of a client or a transport agent, it is placed in the global scanning queue with a low priority. If and when there are threads available in the thread pool and no high-priority item remains to be scanned, each item with a low priority is submitted for scanning.

Using the Background scanning option will cause the information store to generate one thread, per database, running at BelowNormal priority to perform background scanning of all the messages and attachments. It is activated whenever either the MDB is mounted (including during information store startup) or when a new virus database update is loaded/installed. Once background scanning has been completed, the thread sleeps until one of the above scenarios is encountered.

Advanced Configuration

Avast Exchange Server Edition is easily deployable and works perfectly even on large datacenter servers and cluster servers (including active mode). The scanning engine was designed with two basic goals in mind: performance and stability. It's able to take advantage of multiple CPUs, fully leveraging the potential of today's advanced server hardware. It also supports memory scanning (including the decompression of files/zipped files), resulting in unrivaled scanning speed and robustness.

Attachment Blocking

Avast! Exchange Server Edition also contains a simple attachment blocker. You can choose filters for file extensions and file names (such as *.pif or Love*.vbs) for attachments on all inbound and outbound messages. This is a very simple yet extremely powerful way of effectively fighting against both known and unknown malware.

It is very important to have effective ways of monitoring antivirus software's work.  The antivirus software's performance can be analysed and monitored using e-mail notifications and avast's built in notification manager (which supports a number of other e-mail protocoles).   E-mail notifications are intelligent with predefined limits (to avoid innundating the server with avast's own messages).  Messages are only sent to the real senders of infected mail (i.e. if the From: fields of the message have not been forged).

Automatic updates

The Exchange Server Edition uses the same updating modules as avast! Server Edition resulting in incomparable updating speed and size.  Updates can be installed automatically by the operating system or manually.  It is also possible to set the system up so that the operating system asks the administrator before installing any updates.