I was just wondering if advast! scans email coming into Thunderbird 2 from the online Gmail service ??
My ISP Vodafone (Aust) wireless does not provide a ‘pop’ and I have to use Gmail. I was using Windows Live Mail and local client, but because Microsoft enforce censorship on anything more than “BUM” on their blogs - ditched them… 
Anyone have a list of just what email clients advast! works with ?
Since SSL/TLS e-mail is encrypted and decrypted in the client, external virus scanners (including avast!) can’t read or scan it.
The solution is to pass e-mail in and out un-encrypted from your client (Outlook Express, Thunderbird, …) to a proxy program (Stunnel) that does the actual ssl or tls encryption/decryption of the pop3/smtp e-mail and communicates directly with the ISP server on the appropriate ports. Download here: http://www.stunnel.org/download/binaries.html
Take a look here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=10428.0 to see how to set up secure email with avast!.
Advanced configuration: please refer to this post http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=8775.msg97026#msg97026
Thunderbird has also special extensions to download GMail, but it would be better that a more knowledge user help you than me.
It’s got a lot of stuff running … I know the add message in/out don’t work - like this email is scanned clean. Windows 7 (7057) beta.
On-Access scanner
Internet Mail:
Instant Messengers:
Network Shield:
Outlook:
P2P Shield:
Filesystem:
Web Shield:
avast provides special plugins for email scanning with Microsoft Outlook and The Bat.
apart from that avast does not know or care about any other email client. Every email client has to use the very old and very rigid POP3 and SMTP protocols to receive and send mail. It they do not follow the rules of these protocols then they do not work.
So, avast works by scanning the POP and SMTP calls that every email client has to make - it makes no difference which client you use.
The Internet Mail provider is the part of avast that does the work. It can only scan (in the present 4.8 release) POP and SMTP connections that are made to unsecured ports of email servers (typically port 110 for POP and port 25 for SMTP). avast cannot presently scan those secured connections increasingly required by mail servers (like GMail).
It is reported that avast 5 (expected in the second half of 2009) will include a feature to manage secure email connections and allow the email delivered on them to be scanned. This way mail will be scanned after it is received from the secure connection but before it is passed to the mail client and on sending the mail will be scanned after leaving the client but before being transmitted on the secure connection. avast 5 will essentially incorporate the function provided by the STunnel program mentioned by Tech above.
Well isn’t there a gmail odd-on for the thunderbird version you are using ?
I’m not sure if that grabs the email from gmail using normal pop3 and not encrypted, but Alan would know more about that.
David,
I suspect that you had some recall of my earlier posts that there is a GMail add-on for Thunderbird that will download GMail and make it incredibly easy (without STunnel) to scan the messages downloaded.
There is a “but” and that is why I have stopped mentioning it (though I personally use it every time I run Thunderbird).
It is, in essence, a screen-scraper. By that (I think you know but for other readers) that means it mimics the Web interface you would use to get GMail via the Web yourself, it reads (approximately - by that I mean that it gets the mail content from GMail via the Web interface) the screens returned from GMail and converts them to a POP3 stream that avast can scan as it is passed to the Thunderbird mail client.
The “but” part is that the code to do this relies on a certain stability of the GMail Web interface. When GMail makes a change to the Web interface then the programmer of the add-on has to recode to deal with the change.
There is a suggestion that on 1 April 2009, the fifth anniversary of the introduction of GMail, such a change will be made. If this happens then it is likely that users of the add-on will find that it no longer works until the add-on is updated to deal with the change. We will see if this happens rather soon.
In the meantime, as I mentioned above, we expect (note the word - none of us in the user community knows what avast 5 will look like for sure) that in a few months avast may well provide a means to scan Gmail delivered via a secure connection. GMail is currently scanned by their choice of antivirus protection. While GMail is not my primary email account I have to be honest and say that avast has not yet, for me, found a problem that GMail let through. I think that, for most users, the least problematic path is to await the release of avast 5 and let’s see what the avast team has done in helping us manage secure email connections and having them also scanned by avast if we choose.
Thanks for the update Alan, one to watch for the future, both for the gmail change (and how the tbird add-on copes with it) and the forthcoming avast 5 and how it will deal with secure email.