indoor,

Sorry I got into this post a bit late. I am Moderator over at the Off Topic and spend a lot of time reading over the posts.

Anyway, MailDirect and Avast CANNOT share the same port 25. Whichever program boots up first will grab the port and lockout the other as you have seen.

Can your send me the website link for MailDirect. I want to check into the Options or Preferences settings menu.
If you can, set MailDirect to redirect mail to server 127.0.0.1 on port 25. This may work, but I am getting the feeling that MailDirect is not capabale of “redirects” and must operate via a port assignment. In other words, it is acting as a “filter” proxy. As such, it MUST listen on a port for the “mail”.

More information as to how MailDirect works may lead to a solution.

???