Since the update in April, Avast free Antivirus is almost unsable when sending or receiving emails. smtp or pop3 tasks often bring up the processor to 100% and take “ages”.
Received mails show endless “X-x: TimeOut” remarks in the header.
A complete deinstall + removal tool and new installation did not help.
My current workaround is to temporarily deactive Avast during email-trafic which makes the product kind of useless.
The system is Windows 7 / 32 bit, which may be the problem.
Not seeing that on my installation of Avast Antivirus Free.
My system specs are below my post.
You don’t say what Avast Program or version you are using and I’m not sure on the Avast support for Windows 7.
But by all accounts Win7 is still supported - Free Antivirus for Windows 7 | Download & Install Now | Avast - according to this page.
32-bit Win7 means just over 3 GB of RAM usable. Are you sure that isn’t the problem?
David,
thanks for the response.
I installed Avast Antivirus Free ages ago and from then on only used Avast’s automatic updating procedure.
My current installation says: Avast Free Antivirus
Program version: 25.5.10141a (Build 25.5.10141.0)
GUI-Version: 1.0.839
For the reinstall I just followed Avast’s links and did not come across special Win7 downloads.
But I just followed Your given link and the installer application seems to be the same. Same name, same version, same size.
But I can give that one a try and see if the outcome really is a special Win7 version or if the “Free Antivirus for Windows 7” is just a marketing page leading to the same product that supports all Winwersions.
I’m not expection too much though, as Avast knew on which system it is installed, when it updated itself. So, why choose the wrong version.
Thanks so far.
Frank
[quote=“Rundvleeskroket, post:3, topic:888667, full:true”]
32-bit Win7 means just over 3 GB of RAM usable. Are you sure that isn’t the problem?
no, but it worked flawlessley up to that particular update.
David,
[quote=“DavidR, post:2, topic:888667”]
But by all accounts Win7 is still supported - Free Antivirus for Windows 7…[/quote]
… It’s the same version that I had and now have installed.
I’m at a loss as to what else to suggest.
Avast acts as a man in the middle to go fetch your email securely, so it would appear that this is failing. Possibly being rejected at the email source.
yes, and it did that quite well for the past few years. I had a similiar behaviour with bitdefender ages ago. It appeared one day with an update and disappeared with two or three updates later.
So I am actually waiting for that kind of magic to happen again. But as Avast just sent a “customer survey”, I thought I should ask for help here before I answer that survey with tirades.
Normally I’d suspect our own CRM to be the culprit, but The behavior is the same with outlook or thunderbird, so not application specific. Also it is not account- /server specific. I’m addressing differnt mail servers.
The problem is gone as soon as Avast is temporarily disabled 
Can you ping the mailservers when Avast is active?
good point…
I can ping some of the servers and some not. We have our own servers where ping is deactivated. Other servers can be pinged without a problem.
I am getting Mails from all the servers, but a 30k mail takes about one minute or two. In Outlook I can see the counter in the status bar counting up sloooooowly, literaly byte by byte.(15 B… 30 B..45 B…)
We have a mail server that serves two of our domains. same machine, same mail server, different domain and ip.
I have just sent an email from an external account to both of them - two separate mails with basicly the same content (one sentence, small excel-attachment (same file), slightly different subject (“try 1”, “try 1a”). Receiving the first one took “ages”, the second one was there instantly.
On a retry with two new mails but the the same attachment both were received without delay.
On a retry with two different attachments (two ~25k pngs), both took ages.
So it really seems to be avast learning the signature of the attachments.
The process that is causing the high cpu load is asvEngSrv.exe
Weird. So mails without an attachment come trough without problems?
I’m not sure Outlook reports its download speed properly all the time. It might be like one of those progress bars that just ‘assumes’ something is happening. Typically a mail client downloads the mail with an attachment and then the AV scans it. If the AV isn’t reporting back how the scan is going it might just make something up until the AV is done. Just a guess.
Why Avast takes so long to scan the attachments, I have no idea. It looks lime a time-out or a loop or something else going wrong. I’m not sure devs even consider 32-bit OS’es anymore, and maybe that has something to do with it. But that’s speculation.
My guess is that the AV downloads and scans the mail and sends a few “bites” every now and then to the mail client so that this sees some progress and does not time out.
The behavior is exactely as I had it with bitdefender ages ago.
not checked yet, but my assumption is yes, because some mails seem to come in “like normal” and mails with known attachments also come in without delay.
Yes, I’m sure it’s a little bug that causes some loop or so to run falsely. Something stupidly trivial like a double var that is uses 32 bit on a 32 bit OS and 64 bit on a 64 bit OS and they did not check and catch an overflow of the 32 bit var as they only work on 64 bit systems where it never happens… something like that.
I just tested on Win7 32bit virtual machine with latest Avast Free 25.5.
I can receive (POP3) e-mails (including attachment) but not able to send (SMTP, SSL/TLS error). and I can send e-mails (SMTP) correctly with above condition.
So, it’s not all Win7 environment that is affected.
which makes things a lot more easy 
- thanks for testing.
I was afraid of that. because although Win7 /32bit probably is not very common these days anymore, it is not so exotic that others had not experienced it by now.
I’ve read more problems about Avast suddenly not working properly anymore. Hopefully it will get fixed. But probably faster if we can pinpoint the exact cause. What component or setting is causing the issues.
They seem to revolve about Avast blocking traffic. To mailservers. To youtube. Etc.
yes, hopefully.
We have meanwhile actived “ping” on our own mail servers and I can ping them.That did not change anything.
I’ve created (html) mails with text passages and without attachments. These seem to work fine.
So then it seems attachment scanning is the problem.
Some shields have a heuristics setting. Turning it down or off might help?
Here is an update to the problem.
My notebook’s battery seems to be so dead, that even the power supply is unable to run it constantly.
I had to remove the hard disk and put it into another old computer (could not bring it to a proper boot with new hardware) in order to be able to work again.
Since that change, the issue is gone.
The old processor was a dual core, the “new” one does not have a much higher over all bench mark but has more cores.
Hard to believe that this makes the difference between a fraction of a second and sometimes minutes of checking.
There is of course a chance that by coincidence an Avast update came in time with my hardware change, but I don’t think that this is the case.
I suspect your right on that -
In its day my old laptop (in my spec) has a Intel Core i5 7200U 2.5GHz dual core (nine years young). Whilst it is no longer the gazelle it used to be, the battery appears to be OK holds a charge and for the most part in use it is on mains power.
RAM is another area at only 8GB, that’s what I have to keep an eye on.
The “new” one also does have more RAM - The Notebook only did have 4GB if I remember correctly- but with 32bit OS most of the now 10GB is unused anyway. System says 2.99 GB usable.
Funnily the classification (Windows index) used to be 4.4 and asked to be recalculated after the hardware change. After I did that, the index dropped down to 3.6
So the old hardware probably was not too bad. It once used to be a very expensive Sony vajo - one of those actually produced by Sony, before they left that business.
I must admit though, that I have not yet updated chip driveres etc. But as the system runs stable, it’s fine with me so far.