Dear all

Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated.

I am running an older version of mimesweeper (4.1.2) that seems to like putting excel spreadsheets in the undetermined folder. Clearswift have been no use what so ever and their web site is a waste of space. The problem occurs with out going mail only. I have checked each file for viruses and found none.

There is no "user" policy defined policy to stop anything outgoing. I simply have virus checking and disclaimer. I have disabled the virus checking and have the same problem. Bizzarely it also throws in a zip file that contains the sam excel spread sheets, of course my first thought is problems with the files, but there seem to be none!

All e-mail addresses are correct.

Does anyone know the default "purpose" of the undertermined category and what, by default, goes in to this folder? The help files are useless, there is no documentation and clearswift want me to pay to use their site, as we hhave already paid vast somes of money for their software I'm reluctant to invest again. In the next 6 months I will be moving to the later version with exchnage, but right now I'm stuck with this.

Any help would be appreciated.

David

Hi David

I'm not that familiar with this version of Mailsweeper. There are free upgrades to version 4.1.9 (http://www.mimesweeper.com/support/msw/patch.asp) which may be worth investigating, although this is still an old version.

As to your problem. Are the files or any cells password-protected? If so Mailsweeper cannot open them to scan them so will classify them as undetermined.

Also check the following which comes from a tech note:

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Undetermined message with Excel spreadsheet and OLE library failure

SUMMARY

Messages with Excel documents can be in Undetermined for a number of reasons, often this can be caused by password protected sheets or fields. (In this case the Anti-Virus tool returns scan failed which causes a classification of Undetermined). This technote describes another possible cause, OLE library failure.

MORE INFOMATION

In order to identify this problem you will need the message quarantined in a message area, by default the message would be in the Undetermined quarantine area. Select the message, Right-Click open and look at the Analysis tab. Here you will see a breakdown of the message structure including the stucture of the Excel document. Check the nodes in the document. Look for a node with:
CDA Files bad-data 'The system encountered a failure in the OLE libraries. '

This can occur if there are many objects in the document. It is possible to increase the number of streams MAILsweeper uses. You will need to manually modify the config file for format managers found in the MAILsweeper for SMTP\Config\Shared directory. Insert the following line in format.cfg under the CDA section adding the line v:MaxNumStreams=$I500 as below:

[Format\CDA Files]

v:PolicyList=$S

v:MinAsciiLength=$I3

v:MinUnicodeLength=$I3

v:MaxNumStreams=$I500

The value of 500 is arbitrary. Choosing a value is a compromise between how complex real life documents can get, and at what point we assume that the document is actually corrupt. This example will allow up to 500 streams within a CDA document to be processed before the data is flagged as bad data.

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Good luck
John

John

That is exactly the problem. Many thanks for you swift reply, it has helped tremedously. I would have been looking for days until that dawned on me (if at all).

Thanks again

David

Glad it helped. I'd still look into upgrading though - lots of new good features and better stability.

John