Free Multi-Engine Antivirus Scan

JottiQ gives you access to the scanning power of no less than 18 antivirus engines. It provides the means to getting your files verified by practically an army of security products. Just like VirusTotal Uploader, JottiQ is a desktop client that serves your files to Jotti’s online malware scanning service and also picks up the results for you.

Planting an antivirus engine in the system is always proof of smart thinking. However, in some cases the alerts it issues may be false positives, or may not occur at all, despite your suspicion that a file is actually malicious.

Online scanning services can solve your dilemma and give you the opinion of other respectable antivirus engines out there. Jotti’s service includes a pile of 18 engines, all ready to offer their input on the submitted file.

All the scanners it employs are Linux versions and the upload limit for each item you send to be checked is 20MB. Mind what you are uploading because Jotti clearly states that all data passing scanned by their service is shared with antivirus companies with the purpose of increasing the detection accuracy of their products.

You won’t go through too many screens during installation. And all that is required for the app to function properly is offered for download during this procedure if you don’t have it already on the system. If you’d rather work with the portable version of the application, there is no problem; you can get the archive from here.

The interface is built as intuitive as possible, leaving no room for mistakes when handling it. The simple layout shows a list of the items added to be scanned to the left hand side of the application window (process queue), while the results of the verification from all 18 antivirus engines are presented in the right hand part of the screen.

Adding a file to the process queue is as easy a task as dragging and dropping them. Although this is the only way to build up the list, it is also the most efficient and comfortable one for most of the users.

Upload starts as soon as you drop the file in the process queue window and progress is displayed in percentage. Receiving the results can be delayed only on account of the servers being busy, which would be mentioned in the status of the file.

The set of antivirus programs scanning your file comprises engines from popular vendors, such as avast!, AVG, Avira, BitDefender, Kaspersky or Panda, as well as less known ones, like ArcaVir, VirusBuster or VBA32. It is a wild mix that will definitely lead you to the right conclusion.

Each item classified as malware is marked accordingly, while clean files receive a green check. The options in the right-click menu allow you to eliminate from the list all the elements considered legitimate as a result of the joint scan process.

Unlike the online service, JottiQ offers you the chance to set as much as three files to be scanned at the same time. However, during our tests, we never saw more than one file being processed at a time; as excuses, either the servers were busy or we would be informed that the file was “throttled for excessive usage”, and the processing would resume after a while.

One very handy option made available by the program is that it can automatically submit the executable files of all running processes to be checked by Jotti’s scanners. In some cases this might give you a heads up that there is some illegal code running on the system.

If you have a longer list and need one particular item to be verified before others, you can change the scan priority in the list and push the entries you want up and down the list.

JottiQ can handle not only single files, but it can also deal with the contents of entire folders, as long as it doesn’t hold items larger than 20MB. Also, submitting the items can be done from the context menu of the item you want to send, thus making the entire procedure much more comfortable.

However, if you view this option unnecessary, you can disable the right-click entry from JottiQ’s settings panel. This is also the place where you can define the number of files to be checked at the same time as well as set the update interval for the results.

JottiQ represents an easy way to get more than one opinion about the legitimacy of a file. It is a simple tool that makes submitting files to Jotti malware scan service and retrieving the results more comfortable. Also, it brings improvements such as the possibility to send more than one file and check the results for each item individually.

The Good

Support for drag and drop makes it easy to add the files. All the items are uploaded as soon as they reach the process queue and scanning begins immediately after the upload completes.

You can automatically submit the executable files of all the processes currently running on the system.

The Bad

We never saw more than one item being processed at a time (scanned or uploaded) despite Jotti server load being quite low at the time of our tests.

The Truth

JottiQ comes with increased functionality compared to the Jotti online scan service it sends the files to, as it allows you to queue multiple items to the verification process and, more importantly, it can automatically submit the executables of running processes.

Results can be viewed in the application window but you can also open Jotti’s page in the default web browser.

Compared to VirusTotal Uploader it taps into a much smaller bunch of antivirus products, but this issue relates to the online service, not the desktop client.