You can run a manual scan to ensure that ScanMail scans all messages in the Information Store once. Completely scanning the Information Store in this way minimizes the chance of infections from unexpected sources such as unprotected mail servers or improper configurations. Manual scanning scans the entire Information Store by default; however, you can configure ScanMail to scan any of the Mailbox Stores and Public Folder Stores. For clusters, ScanMail can scan each virtual server or all virtual servers on one node.

You can perform security risk scan, attachment blocking, and content filtering through manual scanning. These filters are similar to those used during real-time scan, except some actions are not available during manual or scheduled scans.

You can specify the store database that belongs to a current virtual server. If manual scan is in progress, you cannot start a new Manual Scan process and ActiveUpdate does not interrupt Manual Scan. However, if a Scheduled Scan is in progress, starting a Manual Scan stops the scheduled scan. Scheduled scan resumes according to its schedule.