I am having a problem with e-mail. I am using Eudora 7.1 for my e-mail client and ATT / Yahoo DSL is my provider. Recently ATT (in their infinite wisdom) required everyone to start using SSL sockets and provided new POP and SMTP ports. I modified Eudora to match their suggested configuration and it works just “kinda / sorta.” When Eudora is first started it connects to the POP server and after waiting about 30 seconds it says that the connection was terminated by remote host. This only happens the first time you check mail after starting Eudora. After that it works flawlessly. I am using XP and the windows firewall. The ports used for POP and STMP have been excepted from the firewall. This changed the problem from an every time thing to intermittant. Next I checked Avast 4.7 to see if anything needed to be done there. When I changed the port settings on the internet shield to match the SSL port settings all e-mail connection stopped with a message that the connection was terminated by the remote host. Now it is happening every time. Going back to the original port numbers cures the problem but it seems that Avast is no longer checking incoming or outgoing mail. The icon in the system tray doesn’t move anymore when receiving / sending mail. Everything else works just fine - no other problems with Firefox, or other programs which access the internet. There may be two problems here and the reason I am posting on this forum is to find out why Avast won’t let Eudora connect when I use SSL and to find a way for it to scan outgoing and incoming e-mail the way it used to. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance…
avast, in the Internet Mail provider, does not know what mail client you use to get your POP3 mail (and it does not care). It scans mail that is received via a port 110 call or sent by a port 25 call for SMTP.
Typically almost all mail servers use different ports for secure mail connections (SSL & TLS) and avast does not scan those ports and you must not try to force avast to do so - it will not work - avast will generally prevent the connection being made. Nobody (and no antivirus) can scan emails while they are being transported on a secure connection - that’s the whole point of them being secured. If you want to scan them then you have to move the secure connection management away from the mail client using a function like STunnel.
Take a look here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=10428.0 to see how to set up secure email with avast!.
There is an explanation of this here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=28150.msg229981#msg229981
Advanced configuration: please refer to this post http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=8775.msg97026#msg97026
The solution, as Alanrf posted, 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
If you were using MS Outpost it would be able to do that as there is a plug-in, which effectively has the avast email scanner inside Outpost. I believe the same is true for ‘The Bat’ email client, but the Internet Mail scanner operates independent (outside) the email program and you need a third party interface.
Ok… That makes sense. I’ll give it a try. Thanks for the info…
You’re welcome. Feel free to come back any time you need further help 8)