This was announced almost a month ago on on both the clamav-announce and clamav-users mailinglists. This has not been caused by the changes to prevent excessive downloads.

See https://blog.clamav.net/2021/02/clamav-eol-versions-prior-to-0100.html

I'm sorry, but that does not say "it will not work", just "we won't test signatures". As it happens the current CVDs work perfectly well with ClamAV 0.99, it's just that FreshClam 0.99 can't download them (because of the way the rate limiting has been implemented)

"End of life (EOL) for ClamAV essentially means that we will no longer be testing against that version when we write signatures, and we may break something with a future release. So, while signatures may work past March 1, we are no longer testing that configuration."

That announcement is saying that things may break with a future release. There hasn't been a future release of ClamAV since that announcement. It's also not saying that the old FreshClam won't be able to download the updates, just that they may not work in ClamAV.

The changes to prevent excessive downloads are what triggered old FreshClam failing.

It's the same reason that wget won't work (for implementing private mirrors). It all happened at exactly the same time.

See: https://lists.clamav.net/pipermail/clamav-users/2021-March/010559.html

Note that I'm not complaining that the rate limiting has been implemented, but a warning that private mirrors and old Freshclam would definitely stop working would have been nice, but, as I understand it, the rate limiting was forced upon them by external factors, so prior warning wasn't possible.

-- 
Paul
Paul Smith Computer Services
support@pscs.co.uk - 01484 855800