User Guide

CHAPTER 7. FREQUENTLY
ASKED QUESTIONS
This chapter contains a detailed discussion of questions most frequently asked
by our users regarding the installation, configuration and operation of Kaspersky
SMTP-Gateway.
Question: Why does Kaspersky SMTP-Gateway cause a decrease in
my computer performance and impose a considerable load on the
processor?
The process of virus detection is a computationally intensive mathe-
matical problem requiring structural analysis, checksum calculation and
mathematical data conversions. Processor time is therefore the main
resource consumed by the anti-virus software, and each new virus
added to the anti-virus database increases the overall scanning time.
That is a necessary sacrifice for the security and safety of your data.
Other anti-virus products speed up the scan process by excluding from
their databases both viruses that are less easily detectable or less fre-
quent in the geographic location of the anti-virus vendor, and file for-
mats that require complicated analysis (e.g. PDF files). By contrast,
Kaspersky Lab believes that the purpose of its anti-virus applications is
to establish real and complete anti-virus security for its users. We be-
lieve that "partial-protection" is worse than no protection at all, since it
forces users to resort to personal precautions.
Kaspersky SMTP-Gateway gives its users maximum protection. Experi-
enced users can, of course, accelerate anti-virus scanning process to
the detriment of overall security by disabling the scanning of various file
types, but we do not recommend doing so to users who want the best
possible protection.
To ensure maximum user protection, Kaspersky SMTP-Gateway recog-
nizes more than 40 types of archives and installation packages, and can
detect viruses in more than 350 different file formats. This is essential
for anti-virus security because harmful executable code may be hidden
inside files of any recognizable format. However, despite the daily
growth in the number of viruses detected by Kaspersky SMTP-Gateway
(approximately 30 new viruses daily) and the ever increasing number of
recognized file formats, each version of our product functions faster
than the previous one. This is achieved through the use of new unique
technologies, such as iChecker™ and i-Stream™, developed at
Kaspersky Lab. Each file is checked for viruses only once, during the