Avast 4.7 home edition flagging WM5 calendar "accept" messages as suspicious

General Topics
1

Anyone had this problem? Anyone know what to do about it? Or if it could reflect a problem on my device?

When I receive calendar invitations on my WM5 PDA (TyTN), and accept them, and have a response sent over POP/SMTP e-mail, and have those responses sent while I’m connected through my PC, my PC’s anti-virus (Avast Home Edition 4.7) flags the e-mail as a suspicious message.

Is this a mistake by the anti-virus? Or is my device sending something wrong? Any way to find out what’s going on here?

Thanks!

–Bruce

2

In case of the “Supicious message” warnings, there’s always a reason stated in the warning dialog.
What is the reason in this case? (or even better, can you post a screenshot of the dialog?)

Thanks
Vlk

3

Sure, here’s the dialog, not much info given. I can’t find a way in the Avast options to get more info - is there any logging of any sort?

–Bruce

4

The suspicion, is the extension of the attachment.
So what was so special about the attachment, I assume there was one ?

I would think the most likely suspicion about an extension might be a double extension, like filename.txt.exe

5

Again, the whole point is that this is an automatically generated message from Windows Mobile 5, an “accept” message from an Outlook calendar invitation.

When I look in details at the message (I added a BCC before it was sent) I see an attachment that gmail characterizes as:

noname (application/ms-tnef) 0kb

It appears that Outlook, at least on Windows Mobile, builds the “accept” message as an attachment of a known type, MS-TNEF, as the “accept” signal back to the Outlook that sent the original calendar invitation. When I look around on Google, I find MS-TNEF characterized as:

  • Ms-TNEF is a MIME type contains Microsoft’s rich text format information which is a proprietary standard from Microsoft. The MS-TNEF is usually generated by Microsoft’s mail client such as Microsoft Outlook or Exchange Mail.

So the question is why AVAST flagged this as a problem. Windows Mobile Outlook replies should be a standard type of message to be moving through a PC.

I’m happy to forward this message, at least as it was received when I added BCC’s, to anyone who wants to check it out.

–Bruce

6

I’m just an avast user like yourself but I’m sure that Vlk would most likely be interested in the contents of the email.

7

OK, I had one BCC’ed to VLK@avast, here’s the picture of the pop-up from that exact message…

8

I hope you put some information in there about why it was sent and a link to this topic.

Though I would have expected Vlk to request you email him so it didn’t come out of the blue and possibly get deleted in any avast scan on receipt of the email.

9

Hi, the problem was fixed. Please be patient to the next program update.

10

Thanks for your hard and quick work.