1. Your system, your choice and I think that I made that quite clear “This will obviously lower your protection” along with the rest of the paragraph.

  2. No problems deleting mail from the server, either with or without the edit to avast4.ini.

  3. I wasn’t having any problems, I chose to add that entry, simply to stop the double scanning of the mail on a server and again when I downloaded it. Especially since I personally feel there is a very low risk by not scanning header details and only 103 lines of the email (no attachments) in plain text.

So I believe if you are having problems deleting from the server there is another issue here (UIDL?), that is the question.