I never even realized avast had the audacity to inject a self promotion into web based email.
I have just the file and web shields installed. It’s the last thing I expected when I sent an email,
no matter to whom.
Some company email servers may detect avast’s content and send the message to spam, or
junk it outright. An important communication may be lost. This could be disastrous.
Has avast thought this through? It seems reckless to me.
The problem I have is that the email sig is enabled by default. Before I found that and even realized avast was corrupting my
email, some messages I had sent to people at big companies were mysteriously never received.
I suspect their email server saw the avast “content” and junked them.
The passage of time since I installed the product, going about my business as usual, until I discovered the problem
is the issue. These are business communications - think about that.
But wait, there’s more (of us). Over at a self-named Avast Fansite they have a poll going on this subject and only 16 out of ~13,500 votes were in favor of it. All the rest (about 50/50), intended to, or already had, either turned off the signature or uninstalled the entire product.
Although this is obviously not a malfunction like the ones Eddy and others have noted in General Topics: Wake up avast!, survey results like this would indicate avast is also losing installations by making this option opt-out rather than opt-in.
I thought, for certain, that this was a bug that would be fixed in the next release and an apology would be given for tampering with someone’s personal email. Now you say that a person has to opt-out of this before a signature is inserted for the first time. Whose great idea is/was it to tamper with someone’s email in the first place? There was no lesson learned with opting users in for the Google Chrome and Google toolbar fiasco? And now email? Geez.
I don’t think you realize the precarious position avast is in. If an important message gets lost because it was turned into spam by avast,
this could have serious repercussions, for both personal and business ($$$) messages. avast is opening itself up to legal action.
As I said before, this is absolutely a reckless thing avast is doing.
So if you pay for the product, there aren’t going to be any interceptions to generate the message unless you check the box.
In the free version you need to turn off the interception by Avast. As already mention, that could make this a spam email.
Who will be liable for any financial loss ???
Years ago I used an email program called “MSGTAG”. This program would insert a “signature message” into an outgoing email AS WELL AS “code” that would notify the sender that the recipient had RECEIVED/OPENED the email.
If I can recall correctly, Numerous important businesses and government officials filed formal complaints and the developers/company were held liable and was forced to dissolve/stop the service/practice after loosing legal battles.
Edit: I realize this is not exactly the same thing. I’m just recalling/saying. :-\