Zmarties

I left MSN Desktop Search indexing my machine overnight, and returned to my desk this morning to find that our IT department were more than a little concerned that my machine was now apparently riddled with viruses - since they had been receiving alerts throughout the night of viruses which kept appearing on my machine.

Piecing together what had happened showed the following:

• I need search to index my email attachments, so have turned on that feature
• I receive plenty of virus infected spam, which accumulates in either my Outlook Junk email folder, my Deleted Items folder, or in other folders that specialized spam filters populate (for the stuff that gets past the Outlook spam filter)
  
• MSN desktop search does not allow me to exclude such folders from its indexing (though I think it may automatically ignore the Outlook junk folder)
• The indexing extracts all the attachments from all my emails, and writes them to disk, thereby triggering the virus detector whenever it writes a virus to my disk

None of the other desktop search products has given me this problem. (Copernic in particular makes it very easy to choose which folders within my Outlook email it should index). Net result is that I cant afford to incure the wrath of the IT department, and will be disabling MSN desktop search. (I rather expect an edict from the IT guys as well that prohibits others in the company installing this product).