ClamWin [ http://www.clamwin.com/ ]
Hello;
Is this a good application?
Thanks!
I've been using Clamwin for 7 - 8 months now (since v. 0.87 IIRC). Here's what you need to know about it for use in a commercial environment.
Positives:
1. Clamwin will detect viruses as well as proprietary software does. Virus definition are pretty standard among all AV vendors with some caveats I'll discuss below. For your own comparison, I recommend testing a known infected file or spyware using
www.virustotal.com. It will analyze an uploaded file using all (or very nearly all) AV engines.
2. Virus definitions are updated automatically.
3. Clamwin can send an e-mail alert whenever it detects something suspicious.
4. Clamwin integrates with Outlook to scan incoming and outgoing e-mail.
5. Scans can be scheduled to run at night or when users aren't at their desk. It typically scans my workstation in 100 minutes or so and I have about 15 GB on my C: drive.
6. GPL - free as in speech and beer.
Negatives:
1. No real-time scanning. It does not scan files as they are opened. This may be a neutral issue with some users because all real-time scanning significantly reduces system performace.
2. Clamwin has some issues w/ false positives where some files it flags as viruses are really innocent files that happen to trip the virus definition. Clamwin also seems to be more paranoid / vigilant than commercial AV programs. I've come across spyware that Clamwin and other lesser known vendors detected but Symantec / McAfee listed as safe. There are some ethical issues in spyware detection that I can't explain easily, but the bottom line is that Clamwin flags software as malicious that other companies determine to be benign. It is because of this that I only use Clamwin in detect-and-report mode rather than quarantine or deleting files.
Marv
