This is the experience of a user called Jim. After several hours of telephone calls and Remote Desktop tech support he recalls after an hour of trying to locate the virus the tech support gave up and told him it was in his Gmail. So he deleted everything, trash, sent, archived, etc.. Two years of carefully saved stuff is gone.

Microsoft is not the only one to suffer from false positives. Earlier this year a McAfee signature update falsely identified components of Microsoft Office as a virus. Microsoft went on to say that McAfee's update had a Trojan. This sort of false positives is regular due to the heuristics in anti-virus programs that identify suspicious behavior. Microsoft admitted that the false positive began late last week due to the changes Google made to the Gmail website.

When a OneCare users visited the Gmail site they were informed their systems were infected with the virus BAT/BWG.A. This problem has been fixed with a signature update and Microsoft has apologized for the mistake. It added that it was reviewing its processes to keep problems akin to this from recurring.