I have just installed Avast and noticed that my emails via Outlook Express 6 arent being scanned.
Well they are and they arent. I have 4 email accounts in Outlook Express 6 via 2 different providers. One uses the standard 110 and 25 ports (Pipex) and the other uses SSL login for POP 995 and SMTP 465 (Sky). Pipex scan fine but for the Sky emails no scanning takes place. I see that there is a redirect setting, when I set this to 995 and 465 then the emails via Sky just dont even get through it fails and times out, yet Pipex emails come through but no scanning takes place, same if I have 110, 995 in the redirect box as it says you can seperate different ports with commas.
Any ideas? I could install Outlook 2003 and try that and see what that does.
Don’t add SSL ports to the avast redirect ports as it can’t scan secure encrypted email so the receipt/sending of SSL email would fail.
So your Pipex standard SMTP/POP3 protocol email should be scanned OK (as you mention) the other would fail. It is possible to use a third party program STunnel which when installed and configured would enable the scanning of the secure email.
Outlook 2003 would be better as there is a plug-in for that, the Outlook/Exchange provider, that would/should be able to scan even the SSL email as it is actually working from within the email client not outside like OE6 (which I use).
Have (or did) you another AV installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ?
The secure email ports (995 & 465) are not in the Redirect box for the good reason that no antivirus can scan the secure mail connections. If you try to force avast to do so the connection will fail - as you have seen.
The whole point of having secure connections (just like to your online banking) is that they cannot be scanned by anyone or any service.
The mail client you use makes no difference to this at all - except for the special case of MS Outlook (David has already explained the advantage of this - when the avast Outlook/Exchange provider is used it supplants the Internet Mail provider).
You can have email delivered via secure connections scanned by avast by using the the free third party STunnel software to manage the secure email connections and pass the emails to avast inside your system so they can be scanned. The search function in this forum can guide you to assistance with setting it up.
If you can wait a little longer then, probably by the end of the year, the equivalent function of STunnel to help you work with secure ports to get email scanned will, most likely, be provided within the next major release of avast itself.
I had Kaspersky before, but as it wasnt a legit copy the keys kept getting blocked every week or so, so I have uninstalled it for Avast for the time being. Im pretty sure that Kaspersky scanned the email via SSL as the icon indicated it was, I still have Kaspersky on some of my other PCs so will be able to try it out in the morning.
Ok so if I install Outlook 2003 then the emails from the SSL email account should be scanned? If so then I will go down this route as I dont fancy installing other bits of software to get it working.
if you use Outlook 2003 and you enable the avast Outlook/Exchange provider then Outlook uses the provider to scan each email irrespective of the type of connection to the mail server - avast does not have to intercept the connections and the Internet Mail provider plays no part in the scanning of mail for Outlook.
When you start Outlook you should see an avast logo indicating that the Outlook/Exchange provider is active.