So how well does your free email service protect you from virus infection?

Webmail Email Virus Protection Comparison

Protection?

So how well does your free email service protect you from virus infection?

To answer this I decided to take 3 big web based email providers and throw the EICAR virus at them and see what happened. www.testvirus.org provide a very handy service to do this.

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The Test

Date: 29th of November 2004

What: Hotmail (McAfee), Yahoo (Norton) and Gmail. (Note that these are all the free services not the paid for versions.)

Emails can be:

  1. Not delivered (Perfect)
  2. Delivered as Junk (Almost Perfect)
  3. Delivered to Inbox, but blocked on view/download (Risky for pop3 users)
  4. Erroneously displayed (Risky)
  5. Allowed through (Failed)

Or try:
email providers
EICAR virus
Hotmail
McAfee
Yahoo
Norton
Gmail
Related Pages

The Results

No service is perfect, they all allow through some infected files. They all let through messages with certain encodings (like uuencoded). They all let 'winmail.dat' files through.

Gmail appears as the clear winner with more than two thirds of the messages not delivered to the inbox. Gmail was also the only service to catch infections before delivery. Paradoxically, Gmail let through the most number of infected files to the end user (i.e. if they did not get it on delivery then they did not prevent the user from picking it up).

Hotmail identified some of the messages as spam, which is better than no recognition.

Yahoo! and Hotmail download scanners caught most infected files, but this gives no protection to pop3 users.

From this I would say that...

Gmail protects the user from most forms of emailed virus attack, but its virus scanner is not as good as the Norton based alternative.

Hotmail does not let you download attachments of certain types, which may be overkill. But its McAfee scanner will pick up infected files.

The Norton powered Yahoo! does a good job of scanning downloads, but for a pop3 user there is no protection.

The Gory Details

Please refer to the website for full details of the tests.

Email Service Hotmail Yahoo Gmail

www.testvirus.org

Test #
1 I I B
2 I I B
3 I I B
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 I I B
7 J I B
8 I I B
9 I I B
10 * I B
11 I I B
13 I I B
14 * * *
15 I I B
16 J * *
17 I I *
18 I I B
19 I I B
20 I E B
21 I I B
22 I * *
23 I I B
24 E E E
25 * I *
26 J I B
27 I I B
E/B/I/* 1/3/17/5 2/0/19/5 1/18/0/7

E = Error, B = Blocked, I = Inbox, * = Failed

Copyright © Hugh Reid, Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.