false a/v alert??

I was at a friend's house today working on his pc. It previously had
multiple problems, but is now cleaned up.

I took screen shots of the startup applications to get some advice from
newsgroups concerning them. I pasted the screen shots into Wordpad .rtf
files, and then attached those to email to my home pc. The idea being that
I could work it from my place tonite.

When I attempted to send the email, McAfee alerted that there was a worm in
the attachments.

I deleted the outgoing email, and ran a followup scan on the hard drive.
McAfee gave no problem indication.

I then went back to the attachments, and did a cut and paste job into email
text windows, and I was able to send them that way with no problem.

Questions:

1. why were we getting an alert on the outgoing attachments, when a hard
drive scan didn't show any problem?

2. How do I correct the problem?

 

dear rbig, welcome to the forum. McAfee scans outgoing mails and you can turn off the outgoing mailscan to be able to mail that bit. the mail scanner also looks for some suspicious behaviors during mail sending process. probably this is the reason behind it as the hard drive looks clean.