Kaspersky Internet Security and IMAP

 In Tech Tips

We ran into this really odd scenario not too long ago involving Outlook 2010 and Kaspersky Internet Security 2016

The user had constant hanging when opening Outlook. I went with standard troubleshooting, Outlook in safe mode and also a run of SCANPST. Outlook seemed better, then I rebooted and it seemed the mess started all over again. The customer noted that only about half of the IMAP folders were showing on the folder view on the left. Through troubleshooting I was able to determine that the issue was related to Kaspersky.

I dug through the Kaspersky forum and tons of blogs… Eventually I found the two settings that seemed to allow IMAP to work correctly:

  1. Disable the Anti-Spam setting
  2. Disable Advanced settings of mail anti-virus > Connectivity > disable Scan POP3, SMTP, NNTP, and IMAP traffic

Turning off these settings certainly made the IMAP work correctly. I would say this is a bug with KIS 2016. Keep in mind that changing these settings may lessen the effectiveness of KIS.

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Showing 2 comments
  • Bill
    Reply

    Seems like it’s fairly worthless as an anti-virus product if it excludes scanning email….one of the most likely places to get a virus.

    • Tylan
      Reply

      I would agree. Every time I’ve run across it in the field it feels like a very heavy sort of bloated antivirus product. That being said, the combination of settings that had to be turned off to let all the IMAP folders show up seem more like scanning on the IP level. The actual “standard” email protection was still enabled. I honestly think that the bad guys are so far ahead of the antivirus companies at this point that they are throwing every feature in trying to hope they can stop something. They really can’t stop much.

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