thunderbird is set to no encryption in and out (as required by Orange ISP)
OA free isn’t blocking avast or thunderbird
no avast SSL accounts shown
An error occurred sending mail: The mail server sent an incorrect greeting: Cannot connect to SMTP server 193.252.22.189 (193.252.22.189:25), connect error 10051.
Sending of message failed.
The message could not be sent because the connection to SMTP server smtp.orangehome.co.uk was lost in the middle of the transaction. Try again or contact your network administrator.
193.252.22.189 port 25 is the correct address and works fine without avast mail shield
What version of avast and build number are you using (e.g. avast free 5.0.677, etc.) ?
Have you checked the Mail Shield, Expert Settings, SSL Accounts entry for the account in question. If it has port 465, try changing it to 25 and see if that resolves it. I don’t know if you might also have to set the Encryption column to TLS (from SSL) if changing the port to 25 doesn’t work.
Strange, as far as I’m aware the Mail Shield doesn’t actually enter anything other than the domain name and leaves any IP address selection to a DNS check.
Though all of IPs are for France Telecom not Orange (though France Telecom own Orange I believe). The first, problem IP is also France Telecom, but assigned for MAIL-ESSENTIALS-ORANGE-UK as are the other three.
I found the fall range of Orange servers, they have no reverse DNS so I guess thats why Avast adds the IP instead of the Hostname in avast SSL accounts.
But now the problem is that when a server is busy, Avast mail shield wont move on to another server and just times out in thunderbird. With Avast mail shield off, thunderbird instantly moves on to another server if busy and doesn’t time out.
If it shouldn’t be encrypted in the thunderbird settings then it shouldn’t be set to SSL or TLS, but none as you say it is. So I don’t know why it would be attempting a connection on port 465.
The Mail Shield is usually good at detecting the protocol and ports that can be used. You could try setting it to port 465 and SSL or TLS in the avast SSL Accounts section and if that works in regard to time-outs (probably not).
Other than that I’m at a loss as to what else to suggest. I would suggest deleting the entry for avastSvc.exe in OA and place it in learning mode to see if that a) has OA ask permission or b) learn from what avastSvc.exe is doing.
cheers for your help, I’ll have a look tomorrow. The 193.252.22.140 server seems more reliable, I’ll use that directly in thunderbird instead of smtp.orangehome.co.uk to stop it resolving to the others.
edit: that works ok.
So it seems that thunderbird (without avast mail shield) can resolve smtp.orangehome.co.uk to another server if one is busy (so no timeouts). Whilst avast mail shield will only resolve smtp.orangehome.co.uk to one server (the first one it resolves to) then fails if its busy (with a timeout). I confirmed this with sysinternals TCPview.