I downloaded Avast 4.6 Home. According to the blurb there should be something for checking emails, but I can’t find any settings related to this.
Can Avast work with Outlook Express?
Why does it say ‘I’m a llama’ under my username?
Sure it works with Outlook Express.
You need to see the Internet Mail provider, just left click the ‘a’ blue icon…
Let us know if you have any other doubt or need more help. Welcome to forums 8)
‘I’m a llama’ is the default text for newbies…
You can edit this in your Profile (there is a buttom in the top of the page).
Thank you. I see now that you have to have to click on the blue ‘a’ icon in the system tray. I was trying to access the email settings via the program in the start menu, which is not possible as far as I can see.
I select “Internet Mail” and it says “The Provider is currently running.” In order to check that something was happening, I went to the Customise button and under the POP and SMTP tabs, ticked “Insert note into clean message.”
As a test I then sent a message from my Gmail account in Outlook Express to my Yahoo webmail account, and vice versa. Neither message had the Avast message tag.
Why isn’t it working?
I tried AVG Anti-Virus before, and with that you have to enter the POP and SMTP servers for your mail provider into AVG, and changes the servers in Outlook Express to 127.0.0.1 (localhost). I can’t see anywhere to enter the server names in Avast, though.
First of all, it’s not possible because Gmail uses SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connections. Avast mail scanner doesn’t support SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connections. But take a look here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=10428.0 to see how to set up secure email with avast!.
Stunnel now comes as an installer which installs Open SSL and Stunnel so now you just have to download the installer version from here http://www.stunnel.org/download/binaries.html
I use GMail with both POP and SMTP scanning by avast. No trouble.
Which is your operational system? In Windows XP, scanning is transparent and does not require changing on servers.
The effort of setting up STunnel may be an interesting adventure for some users but since GMail is now scanning attachments internally it may be somewhat overkill for most users to have the mail scanned twice.
Thank you very much for the replies. If I were going to use an anti-virus program to scan email then I would choose AVG over Avast, since AVG has built-in support for SSL and there is no need to install STunnel.
However, as Alan points out, there’s no need to have email virus scanning done by an anti-virus program (taking up system resources) when Gmail already does it for us.
I assume the Avast email scanner is just a virus scanner and not a spam filter as well.
I’m using Windows XP Home.
Yes, avast email scanner is not a spam filter.