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Clam AV for Apple Mail

using the Clam AV virus scanner with Apple's Mail program

go straight to the go to the downloads sectionfile section below

Introduction

To my best knowledge, viruses and trojans still pose no practical danger at all to Mac OS X; however, since they are distributed excessively from infected Windows machines via e-mail, and since many service providers still do not perform reasonable virus checking, it might be useful to have a reliable filter to get rid of such mails automatically.

Commercial software like Norton AntiVirus appears to cause more problems than it might solve, besides I assume it is probably not necessary to have a scanner running in the background all the time and consuming system resources, when all that is necessary is only incoming mails to be scanned.

This package contains an AppleScript which can be called from the Mail application for every incoming e-mail, scanning the mail and moving it to a special folder. This happens only on demand, so there are no background applications interfering with the OS or similar. In addition, the script can be used to monitor the web browser's downloads folder or a special hot folder, for example.

Further, the package includes the munpack utility used to unpack mail attachments, and a compiled version of the Clam AV anti virus software.

If you want a good GUI for Clam AV allowing you to configure and use it very comfortably, get clamXav by Mark Allan (especially since this package here is not maintained very carefully anymore). The script and the munpack utility are also available separately, without an installer package (instructions see below).

Important note / Disclaimer: the script and these instructions are supplied as is without warranties of any kind. Use at your own risk.

Instructions

All the software was built for OS X 10.4/Tiger, but should work in 10.3/Panther, too, though it was not extensively tested. Note that this is not a Universal Binary distribution, so it is probably not working too well on Intel Macs (the AppleScript of course should work).

There are 2 options:

or

Credits

There's a lot of credits to give to other people — the Clam AV project / clamXav developed by Mark Allan / mpack/munpack written by John G. Myers, hosted at darwinports / the (unknown) author of the original public domain AppleScript.
I only modified the AppleScript and added some features (my first project involving AppleScript by the way, so if there are any suggestions for improvements, please let me know!)

More details can be found in the AppleScript itself.

Files