Douglas,

There are two main reasons why LISTSERV did not develop its own anti-virus software. The first one is that we are e-mail experts, not virus experts, and we simply don't know how to develop a great anti-virus product. Obviously we could learn, given enough time and money, and we could also start a car rental business, but we prefer to stick to what we are good at. The second reason is that anti-virus software has a high fixed cost. You need people 24x365 monitoring new viruses, writing detectors and disinfecting procedures, sending virus database updates and alerts, etc. Had we done that, we would have had to charge big money for the virus software. By working with an established anti-virus company, we were able to provide this function to customers for free (well, you do need a maintenance contract, but without it you wouldn't get 1.8e anyway).

In a nutshell, the F-Secure deal means that L-Soft customers got a better anti-virus product for free. Had we had to develop a virus scanner ourselves and staff a 24x365 virus detection centre, we would have had to charge at least $1k/year for the use of this feature, and I doubt we could have reached F-Secure's level of technical expertise (their product has three independent scanners written by three different teams of programmers who are not allowed to communicate with the other teams and in fact live in three different countries). The choice was not a very difficult one.

Most virus products are only available for Windows. F-Secure also supports Linux, which puts them above the average in the anti-virus market. Obviously this does not come close to the list of operating systems supported by LISTSERV, but there wasn't any anti-virus product that came close.

We are keenly aware that this virus filtering feature is a disappointment for customers who do not happen to run Windows or Linux. We have been working hard on this problem and have developed a solution for it. It is not ready for release, but you can see it for yourself by trying to send a virus to SEARN, which runs on VM. Please make your tests with EICAR or a similarly innocuous virus.

As for why virus protection is needed when you can simply disable all attachments and restrict postings to 20 lines, well, there are people who want to allow attachments on their lists, and you can design a virus in less than 20 lines if you really want to.

This is a free and optional feature, if you really think that virus scanning is evil, nobody is forcing you to install it. The decision to release this for free was controversial, it was my decision, and I hope that people do not make me regret it (I guess it is no big secret that F-Secure charge us for the use of their technology). We have a lot of customers who cannot spend even $1 because budgets are frozen, by making this feature free I thought to make a much bigger dent in the spread of viruses by e-mail, and get the money back in goodwill. Obviously this does not work 100% of the time ;-)

  Eric