Clam AntiVirus is an anti-virus toolkit, designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways. It provides a multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner, and an advanced tool for automatic database updating via Internet.

The ClamAV engine can be reliably used to detect several kinds of files. In particular, some phishing emails can be detected using antivirus techniques.

ClamAV Unofficial Signatures are mainly used by system administrators to filter email messages.

ClamAV is not a real-time virus scanner (does not scan when a file is read or written), but can be used with other applications such as ClamFS (for any Unix-like operating system supporting FUSE), DazukoFS (for Linux), Clam Sentinel, Moon Secure Antivirus, and Winpooch (both for Windows) to provide real-time checks.