Avast plug-in for Outlook causes problems with BlackBerry

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi,

we have been running Avast 4.7 across our business with the Outlook plug-in switched on. We have been attempting to discover what’s been causing an irritating issue with InBox sync whereby random messages do not sync their unread or deletion status between device and desktop. After weeks of testing we have isolated the cause as the Outlook resident protection in the Avast client and we now need to find a quick way to disable this across the company.

If anyone is interested in the details of the testing I am happy to forward a separate Email to you with results and symptoms. Just post your Email address. We used the Microsoft tool MAPIMFC and can confirm that random messages lose their BlackBerry custom MAPI property “REF_ID”. This is used by BES to track all messages. Therefroe, when a msg does not have this there is no way for BES to keep in in sync. We were able to prove that any msg that had an Avast MAPI error visible in the MAPIMFC viewer tool also had a sync issue. Disabling the Avast Outlook plug-in for 5 test users has resulted in no issues for past 5 days.

Does anyone know whether this has been fixed ? If not, can you tell me whether there are custom INI settings that we can deploy using the Avast console to disable the Outlook plug-in ?

Thanks

Steve

2

I can’t believe we are the only people who have seen this issue. We have recreated thsi issue using two separate BES servers (1 4.6 and a 5.0 version) against our Exchange 2003 environment with the same results. I guess it must be time to change A/V software…

3

Well, not many people would be using 4.7. I didn’t think it would still update definitions.
If you are using the current versiom, 4.8 Professional, you would have to disable the self defense component on each PC individually before you could remotely edit the .ini file.

4

Sorry we are running 4.8 Professional.