How does the virus scanning for e-mail sent to @purdue.edu e-mail addresses work?
E-mail sent to all @purdue.edu e-mail addresses is virus scanned in the following manner:
- The Mailhub system gets a request from another system that wants to send an e-mail to an @purdue.edu address.
- The Mailhub system acknowledges the request and starts a dialogue with the other system.
- During this dialogue, many pieces of information are conveyed, including the body of the message.
- While the body of the message is being sent, it is scanned for viruses.
- If a virus is found, the dialogue is ended by sending an error message back to the sending system.
- The sending system handles the error message and notifies the sender as appropriate.
What this process means is that a virus infected message does not get delivered to the recipient, but rather, an error gets communicated to the sender. When the Mailhub system rejects the virus infected message, it responds similiarly to how it would if the message had a bad address or if some other aspect of the message made it undeliverable.
