....
If it makes you feel any better, I think that specifically scanning
outgoing email is pretty useless; more of a gimmick than anything
else.
To the contrary, actually. It IS possible for malware to
assemble a hidden virus and send it out, albeit that's
pretty darened specific, but there are other ways for
malware to enter your machine other than via the 'net, and
be missed by your av, but get caught on the way out. There
are occasions where people think they have a virus
contained, in quarantine, but guess what? Quarantine is no
guarantee that the virus cannot replicate. Some AV sw only
quarantines, not deletes, of it quarantines and you have to
manually do the deletions, etc.. I have had the experience
of cleaning out a new virus that appeared in my outgoing
email, but was never detected. I never figured out where it
came from, but I think it came in prior to an update, sat, I
updated, and caught the outgoing. And then there are the
sleepers that fire off on a specific date, laying around in
undetectable pieces until that magic date, and you send them
out before you realize you have them. Never happened to me,
but: It's simple to check outgoing, uses zero noticeable
resources, stops nothing from working, and though admittedly
not often finding anything, it's worth it to have.
Recently when I changed AV software I used outgoing
scanning descrips as the final detail to make a choice
between some equally good programs.
Anyway, my ha'penny's worth.
If an anti-virus program doesn't catch a virus, worm, or Trojan on
the way in, or when the user installs one of these while clicking
away, can we really expect it to catch the very same thing on its way
out?
....