Norton 360 has identified the latest Mailspring update as a threat, IDP Generic. I can no longer start Mailspring as Norton has removed files. How can I get Mailspring back or do I have to move to another mail client?
This is a false positive — Norton’s “IDP Generic” detection is a heuristic that can fire on any auto-updating Electron app. Mailspring is not malware. To get back up and running:
- Open Norton and go to Security > History, find the quarantined Mailspring file, and choose Restore & Exclude.
- If you can’t restore it, download a fresh installer from getmailspring.com and add Mailspring’s folder (
C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\Mailspring) to Norton’s exclusion list before installing.
We’ve had a few reports of this with IDP Generic around updates — it seems to trigger on the Squirrel update mechanism. If adding an exclusion and reinstalling doesn’t resolve it, please let me know your Norton version and I can dig into it further.
Thanks for the response. I was expecting to be able to Restore and Exclude but my Norton didn’t display that option. I had a couple of hours with Norton support repairing my Windows and Norton installation. I did a fresh Mailspring install after adding it to the Norton exclusion list and everything is now fine!