Before I comment on this thread, I would like to thank the creators of Avast for a great product and for making it free for those who cannot afford it.

With reference to the error message when downloading emails - I was having the same problem. I checked out the account configuration and realised that one of the settings gets “corrupted” sometimes. The POP and SMTP settings are always correct (127.0.0.1) but what changes is the account name:

Instead of being:

email#pop.isp.com

It sometimes changes to:

email#127.0.0.1

That’s when the problem arises - and it happens all of a sudden, I check my email and everything is fine - 15 minutes later I check again and I get this error message, I the have to go into the account configuration to re-type the correct info to get it to work. I have Avast installed for about a week but the problem has only started today.