I’m using Avast 4.7 and Thunderbird 1.5.0.8, Windows XP Home SP2 fully patched. I connect to email providers Fastmail.fm via IMAP and Gmail via POP. My SMTP server is Fastmail.fm.
I want to use SSL for all connections.
When I run the email wizard for Avast, it tells me it isn’t needed. However, as long as SSL is enabled, Avast doesn’t seem to check my email. Changing to non-secure connection seems to make the Avast scanner work OK (the confirmation messages are inserted in the email messages.
I’m using Comodo firewall, and enabling or disabling it makes no difference.
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. Another drivers (OpenSSL) are need as a library of encryption/decryption routines. 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