Ah, the joys of software
McAfee, a company which I used to work for when they were a small company and not the huge disfunctional monolith they are now, has a antivirus firewall that, at one time, was code that I wrote. It's been enhanced, in ways that don't seem to make very much sense; I occasionally send mail from home to work and visa-versa, either sending code snippets (when the firewall maintainers have gone on a WE DON'T TRUST YOU drug jag and have blocked all traffic except for port 80 and the huge collection of windows remote desktop security holes) or ayt messages. Today, after tweaking my work mail a bit, I decided to send a simple message from home.
From: orc@pell.portland.or.us
To: David_Parsons@my.corporate.masters
Subject: This is a test message
This is a test
I waited a while, and it didn't arrive, but some real mail arrived, so I decided that the mail tweaks were working and went on trying to do real work.
Much later today (about 4 hours later, as a matter of fact), a message from the Spiffy! New! McAfee! Antivirus! Firewall!, stating that it was spam.
This is a test is spam? Oooo-kay. I think its time to strike, with great force, McAfee from my shortlist of recommended antispam vendors.
After "This is a test", I decided to send an actual (eicar) virus in to see how well the spiffy AV solution would handle it. 5 minutes later, there it was, complete with the eicar virus and spamassassin headers claiming that it had been successfully run through approximately a million tests.