Help on antivirus/antispam

[klamerus]

Help.

We send invoices to customers as PDF documents via e-mail. Our servers are Exchange servers, but the messages obviously go out as SMTP mail and passes through several systems until it gets to the customer environments.

We have several customers who complain that the PDF are being "mangled". Some are saying by their spam filters, but I think that the others are right and that it is customer antivirus filters that are doing this. We've had this happen before and we've asked those previous customers to add our company address to their white list of senders to not block.

We don't see any end of this in sight though, and we're wondering if there is some way to prevent this. We imagine not or the SPAMMERs and VIRUS idiots would be exploiting it, but we need to ask. Perhaps is there some way to just protect the invoice, which is PDF. I think the answer is the same.

Looking for advice though.

Sorry for the cross-posting, but I need to hit other email forums.

 

[xmsre]

zip the pdf in a passworded zip file. Send the password to the zip in the email that contains the zip attachment.

 

[klamerus]

Why would the antivirus not attack this?

 

[xmsre]

It can't open the zip file to scan it if it has a password on it.

 

[klamerus]

I would imagine that the software can't "scan" the PDF either. At least, I would think that if it has the smarts to open an attachment, it is either going to understand the format and so the scan would not cause damage, or it wouldn't understand the format, in which case it wouldn't give a darn whether the file was a PDF, a zip, or a passwd encoded zip. It would just treat the file as binary data. We can give it a try though with a problem customer or two and see what difference it makes. It wouldn't be a bad thing to have smaller email (if zip compressed at all).