Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac OS X: e-mail notifications fail to be sent
Issue
Where you have Mac OS X 10.5 running on networks with certain DNS configurations, Sophos Anti-Virus will not send e-mail notifications when viruses or errors are detected even if such notifications are configured.
Sophos product and version
Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac OS X version 4.9.4 running on Mac OS X 10.5. Earlier versions of Mac OS X do not exhibit the issue as it is caused by a change of behaviour in the operating system.
What to do
- Open the Sophos Anti-Virus Preferences pages for on-access scanning, notification and updating, as described in the Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac OS X User manual.
- Open the Notification tab. If the mail server can be accessed by its short name (e.g. 'mail' instead of 'mail.example.com'), enter this name in the 'Outgoing mail server' field.
If this is not possible, then you must log on as an administrator and create an entry for the mail server in the Mac's hosts file.
- This must be done as root, so you should issue a command such as:
sudo pico /etc/hosts - Enter the password, then add a line to the file of the form:
192.168.1.1 mail mail.example.com
where 192.168.1.1 is the IP address of the mail server, mail is its short name and mail.example.com is its fully-qualified domain name (FQDN).
Sophos Anti-Virus will now be able to connect to the mail server and deliver any outstanding notifications.
If you need more information or guidance, then please contact technical support.
- Article ID: 30660
- Created: 23 Oct 2007
- Last updated: 10 Nov 2008
