My name is Sean Tempesta and I am a graduate student at the University of Missouri: Columbia. I am doing research on open source anti-viral products and I wanted to ask a large user base what you thought about ClamAV.
i just started using clamav a few weeks ago. i was pretty thrilled with it until i discovered that most of its MS-Office-type virus signatures were broken. this leads to many false-positives ("detecting" a virus that isn't present).
the effect of this is, at a minimum, to create a lot of unnecessary work for our support staff - attempting to clean files that are fine, testing PC's for infections when they aren't infected, double-checking workstations to ensure that antivirus software is installed when it's already installed.
on the more worrisome end of the scale: we use clamav with amavis on our mail server, which often contains office documents. i'm concerned that mail containing virus-free files are getting rejected, impeding our day-to-day operations, and perhaps confounding my managers, and their managers, and so on, as documents make their way up and down the management chain.
finally, as a rather lonely champion of open source in my department, it just looks bad.
as reported on this list, there is little hope for a fix in the next stable release. currently the only option is to manually remove Office virus signatures from the virus db (which, however, is overwritten each time it's updated). this seems serious enough to me to merit a formal work-around of some kind in the interim - perhaps a mechanism to flag "iffy" signatures with a set of reliability ratings and allow config options to bypass scanning of these signatures.
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