It’s been awhile since we’ve posted – time just flies when you’re working on OneCare!

OneCare Launched Around the World
Okay, some updates since the last time we posted.  Thanks to all of you, the international launch of OneCare v1.5 has been a solid success.  Customers around the world are now using the service and telling us how much they like the simplicity, ease-of-use and great price of OneCare.  And for those of you that don’t already have OneCare in your countries, we hear you and appreciate your patience – rest assured we are looking at continuing to expand the service to new markets.

Since the launch, we’ve also heard some great suggestions around functionality improvements and features.  As you know, OneCare is an evolving service and we’re taking those suggestions to heart as we look toward future releases.  And, as always, as new functionality and updates to the service are available, you – as existing OneCare customers – will automatically get those new things when they are available as a part of your service subscription.

OneCare’s Dedication to Our Customers
I wanted to address the recent reports of the anti-malware protection in OneCare performing poorly in test results from various anti-virus testing organizations.  The team at Microsoft that runs the anti-malware engine that is part of the OneCare service has also posted today some specific thoughts on the issue here http://blogs.technet.com/antimalware/, but I wanted to share some thoughts on behalf of the OneCare team.

OneCare is tested by numerous organizations around the world and is certified anti-virus protection by two of the industry’s leading independent certification authorities: International Computer Security Association (ICSA) Labs and West Coast Labs.  These labs are widely recognized as key authorities within the industry for research, intelligence, and certification testing of anti-malware products.  Both ICSA and West Coast Labs employ testing methodologies that reflect malware threats that are “out in the wild” and we believe these tests serve as important measures of OneCare’s performance against real world threats.  Beyond these particular certification authorities, though, we are also definitely looking closely at the methodology and results of other recently reported tests from other organizations around the globe for any insights that may help our ongoing work to enhance OneCare and to help ensure the most effective level of protection and service that we can provide our customers.   

It is important for OneCare customers to know that we remain committed to the security and maintenance of their PCs.  As you know, OneCare provides PC care and security using a holistic and layered approach, focusing on multi-layer and multi-point protection.  This means that in addition to integrated anti-virus and antispyware real-time checks of all executed files and regular complete scans, OneCare also helps protect your PC with a two-way managed firewall to stop unwanted network traffic.  OneCare also ensures that your data is backed up properly so that in the event of computer failure due to malware issues or other unexpected circumstances, data can be restored quickly and easily.  And OneCare works to help ensure that you are getting the benefits of anti-phishing technology in Internet Explorer 7 to help protect from suspicious websites when browsing the Internet.  OneCare will continue to treat the care of your PC in a holistic way and will work to continue making PC care and maintenance a simple and hassle-free experience for our customers.

We truly appreciate your business and are committed to earning it every day.   If you have questions, concerns or comments, please continue to reach out and let us know.

All the best,
Gina Narkunas, Lead Product Manager and OneCare team guest blogger

P.S. OneCare and .PST and .DBX Bug -- Fixed
In the last few days, there has been a lot of confusion about a bug we had in the service that was causing Windows Live OneCare to erroneously quarantine some customers’ Outlook .pst and Outlook Express .dbx files when infections were found within the .pst and .dbx files.  We released a new anti-malware engine to all customers on Sunday (March 11) that fixed the issue and anyone whose PCs have been connected to the Internet should have automatically gotten this fix.  Overall, we know that only a very small number of customers had files that were ultimately affected by this issue, and we apologize for any inconvenience this caused.

Again, no action is necessary to get the fix – OneCare will self-update for it – but if anyone still wants to manually confirm that they have received the most recent anti-malware engine, you can do so via the following steps:

1.            Click “Change OneCare Settings” in the Main OneCare user interface
2.            Click the “Logging” Tab
3.            Click the “Create support log” button
4.            Scroll down to the “Virus and Spyware Versions:” section and check your AM Engine version number.  If the text says the numbers “2306” after the 1.1. number – such as AM Engine:(1.1.2306.0) – your engine has been updated already.  If a number smaller than “2306” appears, your engine may still need updating.  To update, ensure your computer is connected to the Internet, then click the “Check for updates” link in the main OneCare user interface and OneCare will download and install the fix.

For customers whose Outlook .pst and Outlook Express .dbx files had been quarantined prior to this fix and engine update, you should take the following steps to recover your email:

1.            Close Outlook or Outlook Express
2.            Click Change OneCare Settings in the Main OneCare user interface
3.            Click on the Viruses & Spyware Tab
4.            And then click on the Quarantine button and then select the .pst or .dbx file and then click on Restore.

Recent reports about this bug conveyed that OneCare actually deleted Outlook files, which is not accurate and has caused some confusion in the community.  It is important to clarify that although in certain cases OneCare might automatically delete a piece of malware, OneCare does not delete archive files such as .pst or .dbx files, nor does the design of the service allow users to set OneCare to automatically delete such files when quarantined.  To delete whole archive files, such as those .pst and .dbx files that were erroneously being quarantined by OneCare prior to the fix issued this weekend, the design of the service is such that it would require someone manually deleting these files from the quarantine dialog in order for them to actually be deleted.  And if a customer is facing a rare situation where their full .pst or .dbx files had somehow been manually deleted, they may be able to use the backup and restore functionality offered by OneCare to restore files from the last time they were backed up.  We have also seen some instances where customers attempted to do a system restore after their .pst or .dbx files were quarantined and then could no longer find the files in their quarantine list – not that the files are deleted, just that they can’t find them.  For any customers who are still having problems recovering your lost files – or if you just want to talk to someone to figure out what’s going on – please, please contact our support team… we can help.