A question has been bothering me over the years but has recently become quite urgent: I have a directory with mail archives in the standard mailbox format from Unix days, currently used by Thunderbird and many other programs. I cannot figure out how to get Norton Antivirus to treat these files sensibly, and it is a real problem. The issue is that mail archives (in the standard format) from about 2000 to 2005 have attachments with threats in them. The usual scan tries fails to remove these threats and so recommends to remove the containing files. But the containing files are mailboxes with thousands of messages in them! It would be fine (in fact quite nice) to offer to remove the attachments it cannot heal. NAV can obviously understand this very standard file format since it names the offending attachments. Removing the entire mailbox is obviously completely unacceptable. Leaving the mailboxes in place leaves a couple of hundred attachments with threats. As of now my only solution is to exclude the directory containing the mail archives. That is clearly less than desirable. Details: Windows 7 64 bit. Thunderbird 3.01. Norton Antivirus 17.5.0.127. The mailboxes in question are less than 1MB each and contain 10,000 to 40,000 messages each.
<<edit : subject edited to reflect the issue for the moved post>