Am I Infected or Not? Am I clean?

[mahme]

Recently I started getting rejected emails from some of my friend's dead  accounts. I downloaded Avast 7.0 (37028) and ran a scan. It discovered a virus BV:Malware-gen in an email. I didn't think about it and just clicked the delete on the Avast panel. I ran Avast again and it found the virus in the same files again. Avast won't let me hit the Repair since it is already deleted.

I've scrubbed the system disk with a full write of zeros, reformatted, repartitioned. I've restored with a cloned backup that I thought was clean (about a year old). The virus still seems to be there although Avast says it was deleted.

Perplexed, I downloaded and ran Sophos (shhhhhh) and it doesn't detect any viruses.

So, what am I to believe? Am I infected or not? If I actually delete the infected files will Avast have fixed problem so  they don't show up in the scans?

BTW I still get rejected emails from the dead accounts.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Thanks!

[Jan Gahura]

Hi,

What's the path to the infected file? What kind of file is it?

Regards,
Jan

[mahme]

Thanks for your response. The path is:

/users/username/Library/Mail-1/POP-useracct@pop-server.socal.rr.com/Deleted Messages.mbox/Messages/28804.emlx

Apparently there are 2 zip files in that email that are infected.

I'm usully very carful about what I open. Sooooo???

Thanks for your assistance.

[rchaas]

I installed and scanned....found "179 infections", all in time machine archives of gmail folders...any reason to do anything about this?  Same question...am i infected or not? 

[Jan Gahura]

Typically malware in emails (mainly in spam messages) is designed to work on Windows. It depends on actual detections. I can't say if you are infected or not.

Deleting whole mailboxes because of a malware latently packed inside isn't maybe the best choice. If you'll use our mail shield to scan incoming messages we can mark infected email so you'll be able to delete only the infected stuff. We can't "repair" mailbox archives because we don't know their format.