Overview

GFI MailEssential uses multiple antivirus engines to scan inbound, outbound and internal emails for the presence of viruses. GFI MailEssentials ships with Avira and BitDefender Virus Scanning Engines. You can also acquire a license for Kaspersky, Sophos & Cyren.

This article describes how to manually update the Virus Scanning Engines for instances when the automatic updates are unsuccessful or failing.

Diagnosis

An antivirus engine has become corrupt and cannot be initialized.

• Any kind of corruption of the definitions can cause updates not to download properly
• Improper exclusions for file-based backups and 3rd party Anti-Virus scanners can corrupt definitions
• Content filter type hardware firewalls can corrupt the MD5 checksum during the update process so it is important to verify the proper exclusions on the hardware firewall for successful updates.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding with the described steps ensure that you are logged on to GFI MailEssentials administration console using an account with administrative privileges.

Environment

• GFI MailEssentials 
• All supported environments

Solution

A manual update must be performed on the engine that is failing to update successfully or causing failed mails to occur when the engine is enabled.
The list below contains links to the manual update procedures for each engine: