Thank you for clearing that up about the updates. However, there IS a major technical difference between Version 8.x and Version 7.x.
Version 8.x has BROKEN my POP/SMTP email clients on Windows XP and Windows 7 boxes. These clients are getting constant Avast! messages about “invalid” mail server “certificates”. (See my post on July 9, “Avast! Claims Certificate Invalid” for the original problem; since then I’ve learned more details.)
I do not believe any such certificate is actually “invalid”, because this is suddenly occurring all at once with three DIFFERENT sets of POP/SMTP servers. Their “certificates” cannot have all “expired” at once.
This Avast! message about invalid certificates appears when various versions of Eudora, Outlook Express, and Thunderbird attempt to access either an external (internet) or internal (LAN) POP or SMTP server. When the message appears, the client is unable to download/send email. The message window contains a checkbox indicating that I can “permanently” accept an “exception” for this “certificate”, and a button to press to cause the exception to be accepted.
Pressing the button allows the email client to proceed to download or send email at that time.
However, checking this box and pressing this button does NOT reliably cause anything to be permanently changed. At some point, whether before or after a reboot, and in some cases after the passage of as much as 24 hours, the Avast! “invalid certificate” message will eventually reappear while accessing the SAME server that a “permanent exception” was allegedly saved for.
Also, when I press the button on the “invalid certificate” window, I get another Avast! message saying that Avast! now has a different way of handling SSL connections and I should enable SSL on my email client.
I don’t know what, if anything, this has to do with my problem. However, NONE of the POP/SMTP servers I use requires or allows SSL connections. None of my email clients are set up to use SSL, and if I set them up to do so, they would no longer work with these servers. So that is not an option.
I have over 90 managed clients on my network. So far since July 1 this problem has occurred on over 15 clients, with new occurrences being reported daily. Almost all of these clients are running on “restricted” domain user accounts. The users have no rights to administer the computers or install software.
Uninstalling the Avast! client and reinstalling from a Version 7.x package doesn’t fix this–which I now understand if I’m being forced to accept Version 8.x.
However, attempting to permanently “accept” an “exception” for these bogus “invalid certificates” does not work reliably either.
I hope I am not going to be told that these “exceptions” can only be permanently stored by administrators because Avast! is writing them to locations that are not write-able for ordinary users. This is 2013; nobody should be programming Windows applications to do that today.
Users are getting more and more upset about this, and management is breathing down my neck. We paid several thousand dollars for a 3-year license for this product. We are not in a position to eat that cost, uninstall Avast!, and go with a different product. This problem has to be fixed.
Please advise.
Thank you.