The programs brag about doing different things, “healing”, “removing”, “nullifying” or “disarming” the “threat” and they all seem to like quarantining. But I can’t tell what that means and how it helps me. One (AVG) tells me things are quarantined in the Virus Vault, and I can see them but not erase them. Another (e-Trust) kept all my Outlook spam in a separate quarantine folder, like I was going to want it again some day. Every day it re-opens the folder to show me what it’s added and asks me to review just the new items, to approve or leave in quarantine. Deleting the spam (the obvious preferred thing to do) cannot be done until after it was saved to the quarantine folder. But why?
Quarantining the file (as opposed to deleting it completely, or ‘healing’ - which probably means overwriting the bit believed to be infected/malicious) means putting it somewhere it won’t be executed, so that, in the not-unheard-of case of false positives, the file can easily be put back where it belongs.