Virus scan your emails for free by sending a mail

 

Have you ever received a mail from a unknown person or from a friend with an attachment that you are unsure whether you should open it or not?

Now some might think, if they have an anti-virus software sitting on their desktop, it might still be safe to open the attachment, even if there was a virus in it. But that would really be taking a big risk. Because it could be an entirely new virus or the latest variant of an old virus or a trojan that your anti-virus is not prepared to fight, thus resulting in your pc being affected. 

Here is how you can take your PC protection one step forward. 

Virus Total lets you forward your messages with attachments to them where they will freely scan your mail attachments to find out if there is any virus or trojan in it or not. All you have to do is, forward your mail to scan@virustotal.com with the subject SCAN. Virus Total will scan your mail for viruses and then send you back the results.

Virus Total scans your mail with 38 different anti-virus and anti-malware products including Avast!, AntiVir, Norton Antivirus, TrendMicro, PCTools and Kaspersky. (You can check out the entire list here) So just imagine, its one anti-virus sitting on your pc against 38 anti-virus engines on the web. Which one is the safer bet?  With so many anti-virus engines running, you simply cannot go wrong.

Virus Total has been awarded as the one of the 100 best products of year 2007 in the Security Web Site category. So you can imagine how good and useful this service really is.

Tip: The good thing is, you don’t even have to remember the email address. Just add this address in your contacts or in the quick links tab in Gmail (You have to activate this from Gmail Labs) and you can use this service at your convenience.

Virus Total also has a file uploader which enables you to directly send files from your system using the context menu. The uploader is only a 80 kb in size and serves the same function.

Website: http://www.virustotal.com/