Hello,
I have recently installed Avast, but I am a little confused (I am a total 0 when it comes to whatever ports my email is using etc). I think I have it set up to tell me an inbound message when it scans something clean, but I can’t see it anywhere in the email. When I used AVG, I sused to see a message.
Any hints/help is appreciated.
Welcome to the forum.
If you are using xp , there really isn’t anything to set up. The protection is transparent.
If you are using outlook express, to see if your mail is being scanned, left click the “a” icon and click on the internet mail provider. Watch the scanned count.
If you want tags on your mail left click the “a” icon, select internet mail, customize button, check the box beside insert notes. Do this on both smtp and pop tabs. While there make sure the box for scan incoming mail is hecked on the pop tab and out going on the smpt tab. On the advance tab make sure the show tray icon is checked. This icon will apear when ever the mail provider is scanning.
HTH
Personally I never put a clean note in pop3 (inbound) email, there really is little point as avast will scan inbound email by default on pop3 email clients. Though you don’t stare what your email program is.
I don’t trust clean messages in emails as they can be faked by some malware to lull the user into a false sense of security. If there is an infected email detected by avast, all hell will break loose with an audible and visual alert, so you will know. If avast is quiet it is effectively the same as a clean message being inserted in you email.
I usually put a clean note in my smtp (outbound) email not so much for the recipient to believe that their email is clean (they possibly don’t trust them either) but to advertise avast.
Besides the email icon (see image) being present the avast ‘a’ icon should also rotate when email is being scanned.
To see if avast! is scanning emails, check one of these points:
Is the avast icon (the special one of email scanning) be shown in the system tray?
Is your email header with the lines X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS XXXXXX-X, XX/XX/2007), Inbound message and X-Antivirus-Status: Clean? (Right click the message, choose Properties and Details)
The clean notes as you already mentioned…
[b]You can test the security of your email system here: http://www.gfi.com/emailsecuritytest/[/b]
To see the Standard Shield and other protection:
Tech has given you excellent advice.
If you use the options of your email client to look at the message headers you will see the X-Antivirus header inserted by avast. This is done without any setup by you on all messages scanned by avast and is the best indication that the message has been scanned (whether or not you can see the clean note itself).
There is always the but …
avast only scans (by default) incoming emails from POP servers where your connection is on port 110 (the industry standard) and you are not using a secured connection. Quite a few email servers now want you to connect to them using a different port and with a secure connection. If you are required to use a secure connection then avast (and nobody else either) can scan the traffic. That’s the whole point of using a secure connection … like when you log in to your bank account online.
Thanks Alan… :-[ :-[ I’m learning from your email knowledge… but it’s a long learning curve… :-[ :-[
Good point, I’ve forgot it :-[ :-[
Well, the user can use Stunnel.
Take a look here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=10428.0 to see how to set up secure email with avast!.
To ATT Yahoo SSL mail see: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=14854.msg238394#msg238394
Thank you for the replies.
alanrf, I have checked and I am on Port 110.
Tech: I do not see any other Avast icon except the one that has “A” on it and spins around when its scanning something. I don’t see any “special” email scanning icon.I did all the tests that you mentioned, but my email provider (sympatico) blocked everything for me before it even got to me so I guess that’s ok).
I rebooted my computer after a Windows update, and Avast did tell me then that the email scanner could not work because my Comodo firewall was blocking it. When I checked Comodo, the Avast email scanner was in “allow” mode so I still don’t know.
I sent myself some emails with attachments and did not see anything anywhere that told me that it had been checked by Avast. My email provider has a message that tells me that everything is scanned by Trend Micro so I’ll have to trust them until I figure out what Avast is doing.
Thank you everyone for your time.
Which email client are you using?
Show tray icon when scanning mail…
Hello,
Sorry for the reply back, gone away for a week.
My email is received through Bell Sympatico which is my internet service provider. The check box for “show tray icon when scanning mail” is checked, but I have yet to see anything within my emails that lets me know that they have been checked by Avast.
How do you read your mail … which mail client are you using?
I’m sorry for being dumb, I just read the mail through the Bell Sympatico email website. I have to login to it to see my mail. Does this help?
You use your browser to view your email this is called webmail.
This is different to normal pop3/smtp email that you require an email client to download your email and then view it in your email client, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc.
The avast email scanner, Internet Mail only monitors email protocols pop3, smtp, etc. for email ports, it doesn’t monitor your webmail.
Yahoo/Hotmail, etc. (webmail) are not pop3 email services (unless you pay for the pop3 service), it is web based (so the Internet Mail provider doesn’t directly protect it). Web based email is simply your email being viewed in the same way you browser the internet. The pages (that display your email) are downloaded into your Temporary Internet folder, just like regular web pages and displayed on your browser screen.
The Web Shield and finally Standard Shield will scan your files (as they are downloaded into your Temporary Internet folder) when sensitivity is set to High. You can get round this ‘problem’ using 3rd party applications to download the Hotmail messages through the pop3 server.
DavidR
Thanks for clarifying this for me. I have turned off the internet mail and Outlook exchange and will rely on the standard and Web shield for protection.
No problem.
Yes, terminate Outlook/Exchange it shouldn’t have been running if you didn’t have MS Outlook installed.
Personally I would leave the Internet Mail enabled and also set it to High sensitivity. The reason for this is it provides another useful function, there are a number of Trojans that send out spam mail and they have their own very small SMTP program to send the email.
Should you have an undetected trojan spambot on your system the first notification might be the Internet Mail provider detecting numerous identical email in a short time. This is part of the Internet Mail Heuristics at work but the sensitivity needs to be at High to catch these multiple identical emails.
However going over your previous posts you said “alanrf, I have checked and I am on Port 110.” I’m somewhat confused by this because that bears no relationship to webmail, whert did you get this information from ?
grcguy, don’t forget to follow these David’s advices…
If you have any doubt about how to set this, just let us know…
I got this from Shields Up testing, but I just thought that it was what I was connected to. From your response, I now know that this is not the case. Thank you for your help.
Another problem solved with the avast! member team!
-brought to you by the avast! cheering section. 
That’s fine, shield’s up tests all the common ports.