Which is the best anti virus prog for mac

[#1]

any advice on anti virus for mac please

[#2]

Sophos free Mac version is ok. http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-antivirus-for-mac-home-edition.aspx
Although I use ClamXav as an extra on top of Sophos, scanning downloads and emails 'n' such.

[#3]

you don't need any AV for your Mac and are best left alone. Both Clam and Sophos are good programs but simply not needed

[#4]

Now hang on, aren't you being a bit naive. I've been working on Macs for a long time and your statement used to be correct, back when Mac OS Classic was still the only thing running on Macs. But these days, with a Unix core to OSX, you do need a bit of extra protection as there are a few things floating around out there on the net. Not to mention the possibility of dual boot systems requiring protection from Windows viruses lying dormant in the OSX partition only to be activated once you boot up in Windows.
For that being your first post here, it's not a good start.
Other than that, welcome to the community.

[#5]

I Agree as far as dual boot is concerned, however as far am aware there are no viruses which attack macs. There are various malware but they are not protectected by any AV. and should be looked at from a different prospective.
Again my advice unless dual booting is to leave it alone.

[#6]

Granted, Mac nasties are not the same as traditional Windows viruses but I beg to differ on your statement that these are not 'protected' by an AV program. Maybe you've just not looked recently at what the current feature list of previously quoted programs is/are.
Anyway in this day and age of large amounts of RAM & HDD space and fast processors, surely adding a little bit of extra protection for minimal performance impact is a no brainer. I can't really understand your point of having nothing, unless your point was that it gave a false sense of being protected but that's not what you're saying.

[#7]

Quote from: RPMozley

Sophos free Mac version is ok. http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-antivirus-for-mac-home-edition.aspx Although I use ClamXav as an extra on top of Sophos, scanning downloads and emails 'n' such.

That is exactly what I do on my iMacs
And I agree totally with all your other comments.
Your experience in all things Apple is much appreciated.

[#8]

Caught a nasty on an 8600 back in the day, so it was possible even then. Forget what was though.
Also got a warning last year from my AV about badware when I downloaded something from download.com (CNET is it? Avoid that place!). So always useful to have.
Is it possible you may pass on a virus to a friend if you share docs even though it doesn't effect you?

[#9]

My ClamXav picks up dodgy emails contents, and blocks them / sends them to quarantine, they seem to come in batches of two or three once a month or so.
Not sure if they are actual threats, but better safe than sorry.

[#10]

Quote from: IanSn

Caught a nasty on an 8600 back in the day, so it was possible even then. Forget what was though.

Probably one of those Microsoft Office Macro viruses? Not really much of a threat seeing as it was obviously only activated if you had Office installed, it didn't do anything with other software packages.

Quote from: IanSn

Is it possible you may pass on a virus to a friend if you share docs even though it doesn't effect you?

Yes that is a possibility, so check your docs before sharing or you may lose a friend!
@ PlusComUK
I've seen a few false positives with ClamXav with regards to the phishing email checking but not in a long while. I might have disabled it though, as it's heuristics were just too over sensitive and didn't help track down which particular email was the problem due to the way Thunderbird stores the emails.

[#11]

Ah, you've jogged a memory. It was a text editor I'd downloaded that picked up a virus thing from somewhere - specific to that prog. It made the program do mad things. The authors knew about it and sent instructions for removing it.
edit -
Didn't use AV in those days, only found out about the bug because the program went nutty and contacted authors.

[#12]

Oh, a very specific nasty. Someone must of had a gripe with the author of the program or the company. I guess it didn't do any damage to the rest of the computer though, just messed around in that program?

[#13]

Quote from: RPMozley

@ PlusComUK I've seen a few false positives with ClamXav with regards to the phishing email checking but not in a long while. I might have disabled it though, as it's heuristics were just too over sensitive and didn't help track down which particular email was the problem due to the way Thunderbird stores the emails.

I only use Apple Mail, and ClamXav identifies individual emails, but you probably already know that !

[#14]

@RPMozley
Yep, think it was only that program. Some prankster, I guess, there were only a couple of them worked on that as I recall.
&@PlusComUK
Is Thunderbird one of those that are really messy with the files it saves? Think Outlook Express used to do that? Or was it AOL mail?...
If TB does that as well, I've gone off it a little bit...

[#15]

Unfortunately Thunderbird is somewhat annoying with how it saves emails. Each folder of emails are stored in a single file, so if say you had 100 emails in a folder the file could get quite big in size and as the way ClamXav scans it as a single file, it won't be particularly helpful in pinpointing anything for you (other than the newly added emails which would have changed it's clear state from before).
All in all though, scanning for phishing type emails is rarely required as they are quite obvious. Just some simple knowledge is required.