JUst switched to Bell South DSL. I’m using thunderbird as my mail client. I have verifed all mail setting with BellSouth and they are correct. When Avast is set to scan outbound mail it appears that the message is sent successfully. The Avast icon shows up in the system tray to indicate that it is scanning the message and hunderbird shows the message was successfully sent and puts it in the send mail folder. However, the message is never delivered to the recipient. I’ve disabled the firewall thinking it may be a problem with it, but no luck. On a whim, I disabled Avast’s email scanner and the emails then go through just fine and reach the recipient. (I’ve tested this sending and receiving from several of my accounts.) The problem is definitely with Avast but I’m not sure where to look. Any suggestions?
Please conduct a test.
- Do not terminate the Internet Mail provider
- In the Internet Mail provider click “Customize” > SMTP tab > Uncheck “Scan outbound mail” > OK > OK
- perform your test of sending mail
Is the mail delivered?
Thunderbird does not store your email message in the “Sent” folder unless it has received a confirmation of successful transmission from the SMTP mail server. I am fairly certain that the email has been successfully transmitted.
I am not doubting the evidence you have provided here. However it would suggest that, although the message is being accepted by the SMTP server, something has happened to the message that makes it undeliverable by your service provider.
Just so you know - I recall a similar report from another avast user. Two error reports does not prove a major flaw in avast … but let’s see what we can track down.
Please report how your test goes.
Tried that as well. Mail gets through that way.
Thunderbird does not store your email message in the "Sent" folder unless it has received a confirmation of successful transmission from the SMTP mail server.
But I’d assume that confirmation would come from avast?
I am fairly certain that the email has been successfully transmitted.I am not doubting the evidence you have provided here. However it would suggest that, although the message is being accepted by the SMTP server, something has happened to the message that makes it undeliverable by your service provider.
Then I would have to assume that that “something” is being caused by avast, wouldn’t you agree?
Avast passes back the actual confirmation from the SMTP server. If avast does not get it then neither does the client.
This is clearly not a problem for the vast majority of those using avast to scan mail or we would be seeing a whole lot more “me too” posts. I regularly receive/send mailt on a range of different account types that I maintain for testing purposes and I am not seeing this problem.
Part of the problem is that the mail message is modified by avast as it is transmitted to include the X-Antivirus headers so the copy of the mail message in the sent folder of your email client does not show them.
It is possble that the modified email message may be seen in the sent folder of your mail account on your ISP’s mail server. By the way if the mail is stored in the sent folder on the server then you should be contacting your ISP and asking them why the mail did not get delivered.
To get more assistance the folks here would need to see the source of the message as it had been modified by avast. If you can get that from the sent folder on the mail server and wish to post it please be careful to obscure any personally identifiable information. However, the post would need to show the placement of the X-Antivirus headers added on sending the message.
I do have a similar problem.
My problem is sending emails with a blank Body.
Looking at the source of the email in the sent folder:
Content Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
This email will not get delivered unless Avast outbound scanning is disabled.
If I put anything in the body of the message, the Content type will change to something like this:
Content Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=“------------040505060105080407090205”
Above is content type for the same email with an added space in the body.
I have brought this up with ISP who confirmed that there were no emails delivered when I tried sending myself a similar email.
I am not sure why Avast react this way to Content type generated by Thunderbird. I have no idea if the reported format is incorrect or Avast is too sensitive to this.
Any suggestions are appreciated.
Drew
Drew Clear,
I am using Thunderbird along with avast.
I would very much like to try to reproduce the problem.
Can you explain, in a little more detail, the content of the message you are sending with a blank body. What else does the message contain?
Similar but very differen’t.
Are you getting any avast alerts, if so what are they ?
What is your Internet Mail sensitivity set to, Normal, High, Custom ?
I can send emails in OE with no body text (just sent one and my sensitvity is set to High), thought why you are doing this you don’t mention ?
My Internet Mail provider sensitivity is also set to High and I do have avast scan outgoing mail.
I just performed a test with the current release of Thunderbird. I selected the plain text mode to send the email. It contained only a subject line with a null body (ie zero characters ).
It was immediately delivered by my ISP (Comcast) to the destination.
Drew Clear,
a couple more thoughts.
You say that you are looking at the message source in the sent folder of Thunderbird.
See my post above - the message only gets placed in the sent folder by Thunderbird when a receipt is received from the SMTP server (ie that your ISP’s SMTP server has successfully received the email). avast does not generate a receipt.
I just noticed that, with my ISP, I needed to go to the Web interface they provide for email in order to turn on the option to save my sent emails on their server in the sent folder. I would imagine that your ISP provides a similar Web interface. If so, please see if any of your sent messages are in the sent folder on their server or if you also have the option to turn on saving of sent messages.
If the messages are being received by the ISP’s SMTP server then the issue of delivery is for the ISP to explain.
To reproduce the problem, only requirement is an empty body. Having or not having a subject/attachment has no effects.
My Mail sensitivity is set to Normal.
My sent or junk folder on the ISP is empty.
I recently switched to Thunderbird.
I do send a lot of emails with description of attachment in the subject and the attached material. I started getting complaints from my customers that they did not receive the material. Email is in my sent folder but they say it did not arrive. I emailed myself with exact email and it did not come back.
After troubleshooting this for a couple of days, I found out that exact email get delivered using Outlook Express or the ISP’s web mail interface. Called ISP and they said that Thunderbird will place it in the sent folder if it connects to ISP, send and disconnect. If something intercept the email, is probably either the Firewall or antivirus.
Firewall did not have any effect. Email monitoring is disabled anyway since I have Avast.
Disabling the Outbound scanning took care of the problem. Since outbound scanning of emails did not effect the emails sent by OE I started looking at the source of emails that are in my sent folder (TB) but did not make it to the recipient.
Here is the message source of my sent message:
From - Fri Oct 13 16:54:43 2006
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00800000
Message-ID: <45302743.2070302@comcast.net>
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 16:54:43 -0700
From: Alan xxxxxxx <xxxxxxx@comcast.net>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 (Windows/20060909)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: zzzzzzzz@comcast.net
Subject: An empty message
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Here is the source of the same message when delivered:
From - Fri Oct 13 16:55:02 2006
X-Account-Key: account5
X-UIDL: 20061013235444m1400hb43re000eac
X-Mozilla-Status: 0000
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
Received: from [127.0.0.1] (c-24-7-184-132.hsd1.ca.comcast.net[24.7.184.132])
by comcast.net (rwcrmhc14) with ESMTP
id <20061013235444m14003tikfe>; Fri, 13 Oct 2006 23:54:44 +0000
Message-ID: <45302743.2070302@comcast.net>
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 16:54:43 -0700
From: Alan xxxxxxx <xxxxxxx@comcast.net>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 (Windows/20060909)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: zzzzzzz@comcast.net
Subject: An empty message
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS 0641-4, 10/13/2006), Outbound message
X-Antivirus-Status: Clean
X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS 0641-4, 10/13/2006), Inbound message
X-Antivirus-Status: Clean
I can see nothing that avast has done to prevent transmission (and it was delivered by my ISP). Can you compare your sent message source and see if there are any significant differences from mine?
Thanks for taking the time alanrf.
My source in the sent folder is exactly like yours.
I thought Avast did not like the “Flowed” format since the only way I can get emails to deliver are either turning off outbound scanning or add a body which changes the format in the “content type” property of the email.
Back to the drawing board for me.
Drew
Drew Clear,
If you look at the sent message source of my message you will see that Thunderbird has added to the message a line Message-ID.
The information placed in here is the confirmation code that Thunderbird received back from the SMTP server confirming receipt of the message by the server. The receipt is not transmitted by the server (under the SMTP protocol) until the client has indicated that sending of the message is complete. It is not until that receipt is received that Thunderbird places the message in the sent folder.
Is there a Message-ID line in the sent messages in your Thunderbird sent folder?
Yes it does. Identical to yours as far as technical info.
When you say identical - did you mean that you are using the same ISP as me?
NO, I am with TDS telecom.
Identical was the wrong choice of word, sorry.
I should have said that my source code had the same detail as yours.
Drew
Xozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00800000
Message-ID: 45304E1F.9080107@tds.net
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 21:40:31 -0500
From: xxxxxxx xxxxxxx@tds.net
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 (Windows/20060909)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: xxxxxxx xxxxxxx@tds.net
Subject: test
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
As I mentioned, your message shows that your ISP’s SMTP server has acknowledged receipt of the complete delivery of the message to the server. The failure to then deliver is for the ISP to explain.
However, I recognize that you are dealing with support folks at the ISP who are not well trained in understanding how SMTP really works or how the message delivery interacts with an antivirus scanner such as avast.
As you have seen, my ISP delivers these messages, so should yours but - for whatever reason your ISP’s mail system does not (and it appears that at least one other ISP does not - from this thread).
Rather than beating your head against your ISP it would seem the course of least pain would suggest:
- Either turn off the outbound scanning of emails in the avast Internet Mail provider
or
- Select different settings in Thunderbird that will still send an empty message body (as seen by your recipients) but not -hopefully- provoke the same problem in your ISP.
Is there a specific reason why you wish to send a plain text empty messsage body?
If you select the option for your mail account to compose in plain text and HTML then Thunderbird would provide both the plain text and html equivalents of an empty message body in the alternative format. Your recipient will see an empty message body no matter whether their client suppports html or plain text rendering.
Thanks for the reply and suggestions alanrf.
I agree about your tech support comments and sounds like ISP is sensitive to added “clean email” comments by Avast to an email with a blank body email.
I like to keep the outbound scanning on so customers can’t blame my email as a source for their viruses.
As for my email formats, I send my emails in HTML format. I have played around with sending in both formats but it has no effect on the outcome if it has a blank body.
I am thinking about setting up a general signature to be sent with all emails and that should take care of the blank body problem.
Thanks again,
Drew
I send some blank emails (without body message, only attachments) every day in text format.
The clean note is added.
I receive them too and the clean note is there…
Maybe, maybe, a problem with your email client? I’m using Outlook Express.
Tech, you seem to have missed the point in this thread.
Both Drew Clear and I used the same client - Thunderbird. When we both send identical messages containing no body text and scanned by avast my ISP delivers the message Drew’s does not.
If Drew sends exactly the same message without avast scanning then Drew’s ISP delivers the message.
It is not a client issue.