Can't send/receive mail in Outlook Express

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I’m using WIN98 SE and Avast 4.6 Home Edition. When I open Outlook Express, my pop and SMTP servers have been changed to 127.0.0.1 and my username is followed by #cwpanama.net This prevents me from sending or receiving mail. I can change the settings back to the way they are supposed to be and then can send/receive. But then when I open OE again, everything has been changed back. Grrrrr.

Also: I can no longer log in to my Picasa2 account to send photos nor can I log into my Gmail account. (These are both Google programs.) I have a feeling that all this is related to Avast. When I disable email scanning, that doesn’t help either. Can someone help? Thanks.

2

This doesn’t prevent you sending and receiving email it is essential in order for avast to scan your email before it hits your inbox.

Ensure that your firewall allows access for ashMaiSv.exe and you should be in business using the settings you mentioned.

Gmail uses SSL (secure sockets layer) encrypted email and avast doesn’t/can’t scan this so it is effectively bypassed, you will need third party software (freeware) to enable avast to check this - check out these links.
Gmail and Avast Providers
Solution: Using Gmail with Avast and a SPAM filter
Redirecting multiple SSL accounts

3

Just curious…if you have MailWasher Pro, or a similar email scanning program, is it necessary that avast scan your email as well? Seems like redundancy to do so.

4

I don’t have avast scan my MailWasher Pro partial email download text based view of that content.
[MailScanner]
IgnoreProcess=MailWasher.exe

5

I´m using only plain text with all my email programs so I think there´s no risk to have viruses. And also assume that Avast still check all attachments in my email ?

6

muffiemae…If you go into Tools>Accounts>Mail>Properties>Servers, your POP3 should be whatever your ISP assigned you. In my case it’s mail.comcast.net. The SMTP part is smtp.comcast.net. Your user name should be whatever you assigned it to be. anything other than this kind of setup would make me believe you’ve been hit with some form of malware. If everything else is doing ok except your email, I would still run virus checks, Spybot, AdAware, Spyware Blaster (if you don’t have it, get it) and at least SpySweeper. If you didn’t assign that user name…someone else did.

127.0.0.1 is a loopback network connection.

This means that if you try to connect to 127.0.0.1, you are immediately looped back to your own machine.

If you telnet, ftp, etc… to 127.0.0.1, you are connected to your own machine.

In other words, 127.0.0.1 is you.

For example, if your system was named “joker”, and you attempted to telnet to 127.0.0.1, you would see:

telnet 127.0.0.1

Trying 127.0.0.1…
Connected to joker
Escape character is ‘^]’.

Convincing newbies to connect to 127.0.0.1 is a frequent joke on the Internet.

localhost is another name for 127.0.0.1.