I am running Avast 4.7 on XP Pro and am using Thunderbird 1.5 as my email client.
I have disabled all Avast scanning of email because Avast was bringing everything else on my PC to a grinding halt by sucking up all my CPU while downloading email. Things improved somewhat after that but still whenever I go online to receive email, Avast is still demanding all my CPU.
I previously was using McAffee with email scanning enabled and never experienced this problem.
I have just turned off the features scan files on open and scan created/modified files. At this rate I will soon have everything turned off, at which point I might as well uninstall Avast all together since it won’t be providing much of any service.
So, why is Avast such a pig when it comes to email?
Same here and I have (literally) many hundreds of megabytes of Thunderbird mail on my system. I have the Internet Mail scanner set to high sensitivity. I never experience any delays with mail processing with avast.
How? I do what you are recommended to do all over the Thunderbird support forum and manage Thunderbird mail (which does a terrible job of managing itself).
Thanks for taking the time to respond. As to my Thunderbird habits, my inbox has just over 1 screen’s worth of entries - a rather small quantity of email; I keep the trash empty; I compact folders regularly, especially inbox, junk, and trash.
And note that I never experienced this problem when using McAffee. And do not experience this problem when I shut down Avast. Therefore, I can only assume that it is Avast that is the source of the problem (not to mention that Task Manager shows ashServ.exe at 99% CPU)