Virex X (.Mac edition) - 7.5.1

Amazing but true:
FEATURES EXCLUDED FROM THIS RELEASE

Scan Contents of Mailboxes -- This Preferences feature of Virex 7.5.0 has been removed from Virex 7.5.1. This product is not meant to be utilized for scanning mails and mailboxes.

Virex 7.5.1 is now posted on the .Mac web site.

Who wants to be the guinea pig & report back here?

Seems like there's a new version of Virex released by mcafee ppl.

It says it has fixed the mailbox deletion problem - how true is that?

Let's see. Virex now, and in the past, has been doing all these things:

--Causes the Mac to crash
--Deletes crucial files
--Prevents other apps from running properly, not just crashing
--Prevents other apps from being installed
--Eats tons of processor time, sometimes the majority of it
--Etc

This is a classic list of problems CAUSED by many viruses. Virex has probably caused far more problems for Mac users than it has ever prevented or solved--you have to take the Occam's Razor view here. And since OS X has no real viruses yet, all that Virex is doing for Mac users (when it manages to work) is to detect Windows viruses in their email, which don't affect the Mac, and so it's just preventing them from being forwarded to Windows users. What do users of Virex get for all this-- the "feel-good" sensation of "doing something for the Windows community"? That's not our job, at least not at the price of all this trouble. Besides, the amount of "good" that Mac users do for Windows users, in stemming the comparatively tiny tide of Windows virus-infected email sent to Mac users, is so tiny as to be insignificant.

Some people will respond, "I use Virex and I've never had these problems". Well, you're lucky. And by supporting Virex, you're supporting its use by other people who WILL have these problems, so in effect you're paying a developer of a product whose behavior is identical to many viruses. Would you pay a virus author to keep him in the virus writing business?

It has the feel of a company trying deliberately to blow it on the Mac, so they can say to their shareholders or whoever makes their decisions, "Look at all the trouble caused by trying to program for the Mac OS! We should drop Mac support and just do Windows." I've seen this pattern several times over the years. Maybe they get a big tax writeoff for dropping a subdivision, or some other corporate nonsense. Virex is McAfee's only Mac product, as far as I know; they make their money from antivirus utilities on Windows and other platforms. Virex has been kicked around between about a half-dozen owners since it was first released--none of them seem to want it. If that's how they feel, or they can't hire competent programmers, and neither they nor Apple provide any real tech support for it, why bother with it?

As ilash reports below, McAfee no longer provides tech support for Virex (imagine--no tech support for their own product). In the past with other programs from other companies, this has often meant the program was in the process of being turned over to another company, so McAfee may be trying to turn over Virex to Apple, who may eventually provide tech support for it, and in the transition, the Virex programming team might not have decided to be very careful--after all, it may soon be Apple's headache--or the Virex programming team may already have been slashed by McAfee.

Maybe they'll get it together some day. The new features list for version 7.5 seems to imply they want to remain a viable product, but their actual performance makes it a weird paradox. I think most people should stop using Virex, and the few people who still want to use it can serve as the soldiers who get the first arrows in the back, and they'll continue to report their experiences so everyone else can decide whether to start using it again. If OS X viruses do start appearing in any significant number, maybe Virex will prove to be useful in the future, as long as its publisher, whoever that turns out to be, fixes the problems and doesn't go back to sleeping at the wheel.

I've tried repeatedly to download this mysterious Virex 7.5 but continue to get lost in the ridiculous McAfee maze of a website. And the .Mac website gives me the run-around too. Where is this download available?