Avast Mail Scanner Issue Resolved - Can someone elaborate on the consequences?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
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I recently ran into a strange issue with POP3 and register.com email accounts for my domains using Outlook 2010. Two of the accounts worked just fine. The rest had issues with incoming mail. The error message stated a generic message that the connection was being interrupted. After spending quite a bit of time nailing down what caused this to occur, I was able to confirm that it was the Avast Mail Scanner. Upon further review, I nailed it down further to the Real Time Shield, Mail Shield, Expert Settings, down to SSL accounts. An entry existed for register.com with an encryption setting of TLS. I did not put this entry in here.

Can someone clarify what this is for and what does Avast do with it? The help response didn’t “help” me much.

After setting this entry to None instead of TLS, all my POP3 issues went away.

Now, I did not set my email accounts to require or use SSL in Outlook. So, I never bothered to look here before. I want to be sure that leaving this setting at None does not expose my computer to additional risk.

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I want to be sure that leaving this setting at None does not expose my computer to additional risk.
Nope as it has nothing to do with your computer security, but the secure connection between your mail client and server......if required by those delivering the email service you use
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Thanks!

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This is the same issue I had with NNTP accounts. It seems a feature of Avast is doing too much thinking on its own and causing problems. The Avast email scanning automatically checks to see whether a server can use secure transmissions. If the server can, Avast will make an entry in the expert SSL list.

As we have both found out, just because a server can use some type of secure transmission does not mean you want to use it, nor that Avast should automatically set it up. In my case, I had to make an entry to prevent SSL for an account in a newsgroup which needed NONE on a server that used SSL.