I’ve searched and read numerous articles here on this, but none cover my exact situation and I’m still confused as to what the issue is and how to get these two to play together.
Right now I’m using Avast with Outlook 2003. I’m accessing 4 email accounts from my personal domain via POP3 and 3 Gmail accounts via IMAP. Avast hasn’t complained and I’ve assumed everything is working fine.
I want to move away from both POP3 and Outlook, so I downloaded and installed Thunderbird and tried to set up my first personal domain account via IMAP in TB and Avast popped up a dialog about a secure connection and Avast wouldn’t be able to scan the mail. I’ve read a lot about setting up Avast, TB, IMAP & Gmail and something called Stunnel and OpenSSL.
Is there an inherent conflict with IMAP and antivirus in general or is it an Avast or TB specific problem? I didn’t have an issue with Outlook, or at least I had no warnings. Is Avast working properly with my IMAP mail in Outlook?
Is there a good Avast + TB setup instructions, ideally written toward using IMAP.
Should I perhaps be looking at a different email program if I’m set on using Avast, or if I’m set on TB, is Avast not for me (I know, wrong forum for that Q, but … )
You don’t have to use Stunnel and OpenSSL, etc. if you are using avast 6.0 as it handles the secure connection. This was also the case with avast 5.1.889, I don’t know why you haven’t updated to avast 6.0.
But you need to disable the SSL in the thunderbird email account settings.
Well, I update the program when it tells me that there’s an update available. As far as I recall, it hasn’t done that yet. I’m updating it now.
So, if I understand this right, if my mail server requires encryption & specific ports (I believe Gmail does), I need to enter that info into the Avast Mail Shield Settings dialog, but NOT into my mail program. The mail program settings should be left as default. Then everything should work fine.
So why did I not get a warning about an encrypted connection when setting up my Gmail accounts in Outlook? They are set as encrypted.
Well for me as I am using Outlook 2007 and using encrypted connection setting in Outlook for both incoming and outgoing my avast is scanning every mail I get or send. It add a note in the last “avast incoming mail is clean”. Well the reason is avast has a plugin for Outlook 2007(Not sure about 2003) so that plugin makes it for avast to scan mail even if encrypted connection is activated but this would not happen in case of Thunderbird because avast don’t have plugin for it. So don’t use encryption in TB ;D ;D SIMPLE ;D ;D
The avast Mail Shield should automatically setup your accounts info based on that of your Thunderbird email account settings.
The MS Outlook email client also has its own avast plug-in, which means avast is essentially working from inside Outlook so the scanning happens before/after any encryption/decryption.
At least that is my understanding of the avast plug-in for MS Outlook. Since I don’t use either Outlook or Gmail I can’t test that.