I've
talked before about ClamAV, the open source anti-virus
software scanner. Being utterly and completely crazy
an intrepid kind of guy, I decided to try the Windows version
yesterday.
As you may remember, the Linux version appears to be a command line only utility. In porting to Windows, someone came up with a GUI version that allows you to run it as a Windows application.
Being a Windows application, the install went without problems. I then ran the program to scan my hard drive. What usually takes me no more than 20 minutes, using AVG anti-virus, took almost an hour using ClamAV. Once completed, it reported two worms in emails stored in the PopFile directory.
OK, no big deal because my spam filter, PopFile, makes a copy of emails to track common traits. AVG already has removed the virus itself but the copy PopFile makes appears as if it is infected.
Since it didn't matter to me if the copy was kept or not, I decided to have ClamAv put the file into quarantine and then I could delete the file there.
This was a bad decision in two ways. First, all the stored email in Thunderbird, my email client, which totaled several thousand emails, some several years old, was deleted. Secondly, the junk folder in Thunderbird was also deleted.
It is possible that the two events, running ClamAV and the deletion of the emails, were unrelated events. But I will say that you need to be careful if you decide to use ClamAV for Windows with Thunderbird.
Aloha!
