Scanning inside .rar archives

I run Microsoft Security Essentials and Superantispyware Pro in real time, and do frequent manual full scans with Malwarebytes free. I also regularly do manual scans on individual .rar archives. In such cases I have always scanned with all 3 of these programs before extracting the archive. However, I have recently seen forum posts (not this forum) which claim that neither SAS or MBAM can scan inside .rar archives.

This makes sense of my recent experience in which MSE alerted me to a couple of .rar archives containing trojans, when neither SAS or MBAM raised any alarm.

Can anyone give me a definitive answer on whether either MBAM or SAS are able to scan inside .rar archives. The forum postst that said they couldn't were a couple of years old, so may be out of date. If not, what should I be using, given that I regulary want to scan .rar archives before opening them.

Finally, despite extensive googling, I'm still not sure whether opening a rar archive can cause problems in itself. For example, if a self-extracting executable was stored as a .rar file, would simply extracting the archive allow the executable to run?

I run Windows 7 64

 

neither sas or mbam are full av and it is to be expected that mse will in general detect more malware. So all 3 scan in rar detecting what malware they know about. Whatever malware resides in rar it should be detected and stopped by your resident real time av when it attempts to run.