Which email program are you using?

Have you tried runing the Mail Protection Wizard again?

Have you checked the avast Internet Mail provider (assuming you are using that one) it shows the last email scanned, so if after downloading some emails there is nothing there or no change, no it’s not checking your email (run the Mail Prootection Wizard again).

Have you checked the headers of any recently received email?
You should see something like this:
X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS 0432-2, 04/08/2004), Inbound message
X-Antivirus-Status: Clean

This doesn’t rely on your having enabled adding a message to your email.