Avast 4.7 Unable to connect to Mail server error

Hi,
Been using Avast for a couple of years now with no problems.
However tonight when i try to get mail (I use Incredimail) i get the following error message:

-ERR concurrent connections limit in avast exceeded(pass:20, processes:fsdfwd.exe[19], ImApp.exe[1]), there is a collision with another program

Can somebody please shed some light as to why this has suddenly started to happen, and more importantly how to fix it?
I have not changed anything recently, so can’t understand what is causing this to happen.

Many thanks for any help or advice given.

Frank

Do you happen to be using a news aggregator or accelerator as well as incredimail ?

What are the processes that are using the connections, fsdfwd.exe and ImApp.exe ?

Interesting, it would appear you have two resident antivirus programs installed fsdfwd.exe:
Having two resident scanners installed is not recommended as rather than provide twice the protection it can cause conflicts that could leave you more vulnerable.

Description: fsdfwd.exe is a process that belongs to the F-Secure Anti-Virus suite. This process should not be removed to ensure that your system is secure.

ImApp.exe is incredimail, so your problem stems from F-Secure Anti-Virus suite.

Thanks for the help, It makes sense now, i did install F-Secure last night :-[ as an alternative to Avast as i have been having a few problems recently.
F-Secure has picked up a couple of things that appear to have been missed by Avast.

I have disabled F-Secure’s Email scanning facility and all appears to be working again. Would you suggest that i disable/uninstall F-Secure completely, or
will it be safe to leave it on, as you have pointed out having two resident scanners installed could cause more problems, i assume you would recommend that i remove it?

Thanks for your help.

Frank

Disabling it may not be enough as in the registry there could be legacy device drivers.

I would say there is to much chance of a conflict and you should uninstall it.

No single product is likely to detect everything so there are on-demand solutions that have no resident scanner, bitdefender free I believe is on-demand only there are others. You didn’t give an indication of what was detected, it could be adware or spyware and if so I would suggest you also have a program that specialises in anti-spyware, see below.

It may however be easire to periodically do an on-line scan from another AV scanner. Before doing an on-line scan, establish your connection and just before the scan pause the standard shield to avoid possible conflict, once complete enable the standard shield.

The only one I would advise against is panda’s on-line scan as it doesn’t encrypt its signature and avast will detect them later, but worst of all it dumps all this cr*& i the system folder making it hard to remove. On-line Virus Scanners and other useful Links Security-Ops.eu.tt.

If you haven’t already got this software (freeware), download, install, update and run it periodically.

  1. Ewido, a.k.a. avg anti-spyware If using winXP.
  2. Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition

Welcome to the forums.

DavidR,

Thanks for the welcome, and for the help and advice too.

Frank

No problem, let us know how you get on with the uninstall, it should clear you previous problem.

Edit avast4.ini, find the section [MailScanner], add (or edit) the line IgnoreProcess.

[MailScanner]
IgnoreProcess=fsdfwd.exe

This is a typical situation where the ignored process option is really useful. From the error message you can see, that we have seen the Incredimail (ImApp.exe) first and already scanned the message, but next 19 times the fsdfwd.exe redirected the outgoing connection to itself and again and again…

But for sure, it’s better do not having two antivirus at the same time in the same computer. Disable is not enough…

Tech,

are you aware that your recommendation, telling avast to ignore another antivirus’ mail scanner, is exactly the same as turning off the avast Internet Mail provider? Surely it would be a lot easier for the user to do that than mess with the avast4.ini file?

I’ve corrected my earlier post.