Preferences

Feel free to modify ClamXAV’s preferences settings so that they work for you - we’ve pre-configured them, but you’re in charge!

General Preferences

Alert

• The first two options sound an alert and display a notification if any infected files are found or when a scan completes - so you can safely go away and do something else while ClamXAV does its thing and the results will be there waiting for you when you get back.
• Count infections on Dock icon simply places a badge on top of the ClamXAV icon in the Dock, so you can see at a glance how many infected items were found.

Show ClamXAV menu item

This allows you to hid the ClamXAV menu item if you’re short on real estate at the top of your screen. Don’t worry, ClamXAV and Sentry will both still work even if you disable the menu item - and you won’t miss out on any notifications either.

Animate ClamXAV menu item

Untick this option if you like seeing the menu item, but don’t want to be distracted by the animation that tells you that ClamXAV is doing its thing.

Update Preferences

Automatic Database Updates

Keep this turned on to allow ClamXAV to ensure that its malware database is always up-to-date. When this is enabled, the database will be updated every time you start up your computer, log in, or open ClamXAV.

Scheduled Database Updates

Our malware database can be updated several times a day, so choose an update frequency that suits you. We strongly advise you to keep at least one of the above options enabled

Usage and System Info

• Sharing your anonymous information about the hardware you’re using (iMac, MacMini, MacBook Pro, etc) and also your processor, memory and version of macOS is extremely helpful to us. The more we know about the technical capabilities of your machine, the better we can support you with the future versions of ClamXAV.
• Rest assured, you cannot be personally identified by any of this information, but feel free to check out our privacy policy to see how we use it.

Quarantine

Auto-Quarantine

• By default, ClamXAV will automatically quarantine infected items it encounters. This allows you to gather together the infected items for inspection in case you want to keep anything. This can be changed on a case-by-case basis in the Settings Area for the item in question.
• The Open Quarantine button displays the contents of the items in quarantine.
• If you’ve gathered a number of infected items over time, the quarantine folder may get quite large. You can empty it quickly and easily by clicking the Empty Quarantine Folder button.

Energy Saver Preferences

Battery

• If you have a laptop, and it’s not plugged in, you can prevent ClamXAV from running scheduled scans while on battery power.

Sleep

• If you’re scanning a large hard drive, you probably want to enable this setting to prevent your Mac from going to sleep in the middle of a scan. If your computer is allowed to sleep, any scans which were in progress will simply continue as soon as your Mac wakes up.

• With the second option enabled, ClamXAV can wake up your computer when it’s time to run a scheduled scan. Note that a laptop which is sleeping with the lid shut, can not be woken by any app.

• If you have allowed ClamXAV to wake your Mac to perform a scan, this third option also allows ClamXAV to put your Mac back to sleep again after the scan has completed.

Advanced

Enable beta ClamXAV updates

Before publicly releasing an update, we go through a number of test version to iron out bugs, test functionality and new features. Enable the checkbox if you’d like to take part in this process. Remember, by the very nature of test software, it’s highly likely to contain bugs and incomplete features.

Enable detection of non-Mac malware

ClamXAV can make use of a malware database provided by the wider open-source community to provide detection of some Windows-based and Android-based malware. This added protection can greatly increase the time taken to perform a scan, and also increases the memory requirements of ClamXAV, so you should consider this trade-off before turning the option on.

Enable Sentry background monitor

Sentry is the part of ClamXAV which monitors your computer in the background and scans new files as they land on your computer. Keeping this option enabled is the best way for ClamXAV to protect you and your Mac.

Scan inserted disks

If you use external hard drives, USB memory sticks, CDs/DVDs, disk images etc., then this option will allow ClamXAV to scan those items automatically as they’re connected to your Mac.

Pause for 5/10/30/60 minutes

Sometimes it can be helpful to pause ClamXAV for a defined period of time. For example, if you’re trying to work through an incompatibility with some software, it’s useful to be able to disable ClamXAV temporarily, to work out where the incompatibility lies. You can specify how long it should be paused for. While paused, ClamXAV will not perform any system monitoring or automatic scanning. After the selected time has elapsed, ClamXAV will automatically re-enable Sentry for you.

ClickFix Protection

There’s a particularly devastating type of malware doing the rounds just now. So much so, we’ve added some very specific protections against it in ClamXAV.

The Monitor the clipboard option will check any text-based content on the clipboard as soon as anything is copied to it, to see if it matches known techniques used in ClickFix campaigns.

The same checks are performed when you start dragging any selected text around, if you enable Monitor drag & drop.

ClamXAV can also intercept AppleScript links on the web and check them. If they’re clean it simply passes the link straight onto ScriptEditor. If they appear to be malicious, ClamXAV will warn you, and you can choose to either drop the link or continue with opening it in ScriptEditor.

Reports

If you’ve been using ClamXAV for a long time, you’ll know that the reports database can very quickly fill up with old scan/update data. This option gives you the ability to delete reports automatically after a certain amount of time…or keep them forever.