VirusScanNT causing max CPU & very slow email download

[Simon Bowring]

>Recently, I have found that when McAfee is Enabled in the system 
>tray and I have email to download, during the download of the email 
>the messages come down very very slowly and my CPU is maxed with 
>the mcshield task taking up all of the CPU cycles.  This same 
>behavior doesn't happen when I tried downloading with Netscape 
>pop mail or Lotus Notes pop mail.  

PMMail stores each email in a separate file. This is extremely 
convenient for many purposes but possibly inefficient.

It's possible (probable?) that NS and notes download the messages 
into a single "database" file - since the virus scanner's 
"on-access" scanning is invoked on each file create/open/close 
operation, it will be kept very busy when PMMail/2k is creating 
all these files.

*Assuming* your virus s/w is NOT capable of looking inside 
MIME/UUEncoded/base64 format files (and it probably isn't),
you should disable the on-access scanning of the PMMail/2000
inbox directory (.../INBOX.FLD),  since the s/w won't be 
able to detect any viruses therein anyway).

Even if the virus software does understand these file formats,
the same solution should work, since any potential virus in an
email cannot become active until it is decoded into a "proper"
file, and since this does not happen in the inbox folder, the 
on-access scanner will detect it at the time of decoding.


Hope this helps.

Simon Bowring
Senior Software Engineer
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