Overview

GFI MailEssential uses multiple antivirus engines to scan inbound, outbound and internal emails for the presence of viruses. Avira is one of the Virus Scanning Engines shipped with MailEssentials. 

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

Diagnosis

Symptoms that the Avira antivirus engine has become corrupt and cannot be initialized include:

• A definition in the engine is corrupt and is not allowing the Auto updates to complete successfully.
• Items will land in the Failed mails folder when the engine fails to initialize.
• 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

1. Open a browser and navigate to http://cdnupdate.gfi.com/
2. Navigate to the following directory "incav2>avira>c1" folder and click the "avira_current_version_c1.zip" link to download the latest Avira definitions.
3. After the download has completed you will need to navigate to services.msc and stop the SMTP or Microsoft Exchange Transport service (note this will stop mail flow and queue the messages in Microsoft Exchange until restarted)
4. In services.msc console locate and stop all GFI services related to GFI MailEssentials
5. Extract the downloaded zip from step 2 to the following location "...\GFI\MailEssentials\Updater\Avira" and overwrite when prompted by Microsoft Windows
6. Navigate to the directory where you just extracted the files from the previous step  "...\GFI\MailEssentials\Updater\Avira" and locate the file "avira.zip"
7. Extract the avira.zip twice to the following locations "...\GFI\MailEssentials\AntiVirus\avira" and "...\GFI\MailEssentials\AntiVirus\backup\avira" and overwrite when prompted
8. Restart all services stopped in Steps 3 and 4.
9. Open GFI MailEssentials configuration and verify that the Avira engine has been updated successfully to the latest version

Confirmation

Open MailEssentials configuration and verify that the Avira Engine has been updated successfully with the latest definitions by navigating to Email Security > Virus Scanning Engines > Avira then opening the Updates tab.