It seems that Avast! is using its SPAM prefix to mark, not the incoming emails that it plonks in my Spam folder, but rather some of the outgoing emails that I am responsible for. Huh? Surely the point, if any, of a SPAM prefix is to alert the user that incoming emails may be spamtastic, not to pass judgement on the outgoing stuff the user is generating. And since the Avast! spamblocker settings don’t distinguish between incoming and outgoing email, it seems I’m stuck with it unless I want to turn off the antispam module altogether (which I don’t) or stop it from flagging any emails as spam (which I also don’t). What I want it to do is flag the incoming mails which it thinks are spam (which it currently isn’t doing), and not to flag the outgoing mails which it thinks are spam (which it currently is doing). I thought this was how it was supposed to work!
Avast! provide the module for whitelist for each trustable email account which is indicated as a spam DNS.
You may use it to indicate your friend or colleague email account in there.
What would probably be better is to find why the anti-spam module considers your outbound email to be spam and tweak any settings if possible to allow it through. Unfortunately I don’t use AIS with its anti-spam function, so I don’t know who much it can be tweaked in its spam filtering.
That would be better than simply excluding outbound email scanning.
What I can’t say it’s not admissible that the Antispam module classify my own mail.
What if I want to send the same email to a lot of people?
What if I want to send a particular email with only a link or so?
I’ve disabled outbound scanning until avast team say something.
OK, I’ve found out where AIS draws the distinction between incoming and outgoing email, and it’s not in the Antispam & Blockers section, it’s in the Mail Shield. Seems a rather artificial division of responsibility, but at least now I know how to stop the outgoing stuff being flagged as SPAM. But now I start to look closer at the settings, there is more stuff that I don’t understand. This spam flag is not getting applied to all the emails that are in my junk folder. I’m guessing they have been preclassified as spam and placed there by my ISP, but I don’t imagine that excludes them from being scanned. So why are none of them acquiring the SPAM label?
Aha, my error. Somewhat confusingly (in my opinion), the SPAM flag does not appear in the Subject as displayed in message pane list view, but it does appear in the subject line when any particular message is selected for display. Since I’m in the habit of deleting messages in the junk folder without selecting them, I 've never got to see it until tonight, when I suddenly tried the experiment.
Hmmm … isn’t the point of flagging as SPAM to advise the user not to select it for viewing? In which case, wouldn’t it be better to display it in the Subject in the message pane list view instead? ???
Not going to edit again, going to start a new thread, because it gets worse.
I’ve just been browsing my outbox and it seems these spamflagged messages are not a minority at all, but the vast majority. Not that I’d know if I hadn’t forwarded one or two of them, because as I said in my previous email, it only shows up when I select a message, not in the message pane. This morning I looked at a few more and to be more precise, 19 out of the last 20 emails I have sent are flagged as SPAM when I select them.
This includes (all but one of) the ones I have sent since I disabled outbound mail scanning last night.
Looks like its time to call in my 30 days post-installation free telephone support.
I’m not using AIS anymore, but when I was, I use to disable the spam filter permanently. It’s completely useless with Thunderbird. First it’s only able to mark stuff as spam and not to move anything to a predefined junk folder, second my email provider has an excellent spam filter, and last Thunderbird itself has if selected dynamic anti-spam abilities on board
Another thing, when a mail is wrongly flagged as spam by Avast, it’s impossible to un-flag it unless one re-downloads the mails from the server. Yeah they’re only flagged as spam in the client, so in IMAP unsubscribe/re-subscribe does the trick.
As to outgoing mail filtering, I’ve never noticed any (fortunately). The only thing you can do there if wanted is that all your recipients can be white listed automatically. And no the mail shield settings doesn’t interfere with the spam filter. Disabling the scanning of outgoing or incoming mails for viruses does’t change anything to the spam filter behavior. This said the spam filter may have to use (not sure but I can’t see how it would work otherwise) the mail shield proxy, but that’s all.
ps: at the OP, after reading your thread on Mozillazine: learn a bit more about Thunderbird, it’s important to make the difference between what comes from the client, what comes from the server, and what comes from an external application.
I had no choice but to follow your link instead, as I can no longer find the phone number for the 30 day support. I thought it was displayed in the Avast UI but if so it has now vanished (after 14 days). Anyway, I will most certainly let you know the results. Meantime, folks may be interested in this partial screenshot of my outbox. It shows:
the email that first alerted me to the problem, when I forwarded it to a different address
a test email that I sent to myself tonight (note the flag is not shown in the message pane)
a copy I forwarded to myself which makes the flag visible.
I have new information to add. It gets worse again. I have just added a reply to the (as yet unanswered) support ticket I submitted, as follows in italics:
This morning I disabled the anti-spam module. The first email I tried to send (a reply in a Microsoft support ticket conversation that has been ongoing for a couple of weeks), Thunderbird told me that sending failed because the server did not suppoer authentication and I was trying to use authentication in the settings for that server. So I had a look at the settings and this was not the case. Suspicious about the timing, I re-enabled the anti-spam module and this time the message was sent successfully. So there seems to be something badly wrong with the way Avast IS is handling my outgoing email.
I’ve just done another test. With the Avast UI open at the anti-spam module spam protection window, I sent myself a new email and watched what happened, and this was the result:
