SmarterTools, please help! Thank you.

Hello Stefan! I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble with ClamAV after applying Windows Updates or restarting the server. Because this isn't something we've seen elsewhere, I suspect something environmental. When ClamAV fails to start, do you get any errors or other notifications of any kind in the Windows Event Viewer? You can review the System and Application log files and can filter them to Critical, Error, and Warning to narrow your search as well.

No, all I see is a lot of mails in SmarterMail with ClamAV not available.

ClamAV isn't a service so there are no logs in the Windows event log.

Hi Stefan. What do you mean a lot of mails in SmarterMail; do you mean the spool starts to back up? This shouldn't happen when ClamAV is unavailable. The clamd.exe executable has to run and depend on dependencies in Windows, so will log to the Event Viewer if it fails to start up. Lastly, you can also check the log files contained within the clam directory in our installation directory. I hope that helps get you going in the right direction on this!

No, I get mails from SmarterMail server that ClamAV ist not running and because of always starting and failing I get thousand of these messages until I solve this issue with the steps described.

And if you look into the other post you see that the log files don't give any information why ClamAV isn't starting correctly as it should.

In that case Stefan I'd recommend one of two approaches: 

1. Clone the environment's data (but not the Operating System itself) to a test machine to see if issues persist there. This should help eliminate some environmental concerns. 

2. Submit a support ticket on this so we can help dig into this further. We may be able to enable some debug logging to at least point us in the right direction as to the root cause. 

Thanks Stefan.

Regarding 1: I will have a look to do this on the weekend.

Regarding 2: I'm a user of the free edition for private purposes. So there's no support by ticket available.

Good luck Stefan, let us know if you see anything you have questions on! ClamAV is also a free product essentially, so you can likely ping them directly on their forums for some guidance as well: https://www.clamav.net/

I didn't had time to test SmarterMail on a new installation to see if the issue with ClamAV will be solved.

But today I updatet SmarterMail to the actual release candidate. With the restart of SmarterMail there was no issue with ClamAV not running correctly. I will see what happens when restarting the server next time.

A very nice thing of the new SmarterMail release is it's very fast reaction. The login procedure to Webmail is now very fast and also browsing the folders :-). Good job, SmarterTools.

If the next restart does give you any trouble please submit a ticket we’d be happy to take a look and see if we can get this resolved for you. We’re happy to hear you’re enjoying the new version - it’s been a long road - but worth every step!

The next restart of the complete server has the same issue. I the have to stop message scanning and reactivate it. Because of the free edition for private use I can't open a ticket.

I wish you all a merry christmas and a happy new year.

I think their forums might be your best bet because they'll be able to request specific diagnostics from you to get to the bottom of it. If you run into any questions you're not sure how to answer though please don't hesitate to follow up with me here. 

With the newer releases of SmarterMail I didn't have this issue any more. I will have a closer look on this the next weeks but it seems to be fixed now.

One more thing regarding ClamAV: SmarterMail installs release 1.2.0. On the ClamAV website you get 1.2.1. So it would be nice if SmarterTools updates ClamAV, too. Thank you.

In build 8825 ClamAV is updated to 1.2.2.