Avast Free email alerts not working

I’m hoping someone from the community can offer some assistance with this issue. About a month ago, the Avast Free antivirus we use stopped being able to send email alerts. When I went into the settings for Alerts and attempted to send the test email, I received this error:
“Error while sending the alert. A request to send or receive data was disallowed because the socket had already been shut down in that direction with a previous shutdown call.”
I’ve tried Googling the issue but haven’t been able to find a solution. Has anyone else had this problem and were you able to resolve it? Thank you very much for your help and time.

Tried avast repair and reboot >> https://support.avast.com/en-us/article/Repair-Antivirus

Personally I have never managed to get this function to work (was able to send test email) in Avast Free and I have been using Avast Free for over 15 years.

Good on you if you managed to get it working previously. I never got any errors as such, it just didn’t work.

Thank you for the reply. I performed the repair and reboot. Unfortunately it still gives me the same error message.