1. Guy's... Vlk was going to enlighten in a past post, but I think he's forgotten

Sorry, Vlk has been busy lately. Really… :-\

  1. Perhaps the Avast team will chime in, but lately I've noticed they pick and choose what questions to answer

More precisely, I’ve chosen the questions that I could answer immediately, almost without thinking. Reason? See item 1. above :-[

Anyways, now it’s the weekend and I finally have some time to do some work, right? :slight_smile:

OK Walker, let me explain the avast/Outlook interactions in more detail.

avast has it’s own Outlook plug-in (“add-in” in MS parlance) that’s being loaded into the Outlook process (Outlook.exe) and exposes some well-defined APIs for communication with Outlook. E.g., Outlook itself calls the plugin whenever a new mail is received to scan it. The point here is that it works transparently, with no extra config requirements. NO changes to pop/smtp servers! (No 127.0.0.1 trick - so if you’ve set up Outlook mail accounts to use 127.0.0.1, you simply have it wrong. The Mail Protection Wizard explicitly ignores Outlook accounts, of course.).

Now, back to your problems. I don’t quite believe the problems are related to avast. I’ve tried searching the Usenet (via Google Groups) and found a couple of guys with the same problem - but unfortunately, no straightforward solution. Anyway, it should be quite easy to find out whether it’s avast or not - just disable the avast add-in and see what happens. To do this, go to Outlook Tools menu → Options → Other → Advanced Options → Add-in Manager, and uncheck avast. Restart Outlook - this time, the avast plugin won’t load at all. If it solves your troubles, then I have a problem; otherwise, you have a problem. Deal? :slight_smile:

Take care,
Vlk