I have a few e-mail addresses. Some are typical POP mail addresses using ports 110 and 25 for POP and SMTP. Others are gmail addresses using ports 995 and 465 with a SSL connection, whatever that is.
I use Outlook for some addresses and Outlook Express for others, both using both types of e-mail address. I also use Mail Washer Pro which checks all addresses.
I am currently using Norton Internet Security 2005. I do not think it is protecting my gmail message traffic.
No trouble, if you use XP it will be transparently (directly). If you have 98 or Me, you’ll just need to run Mail Protection Wizard.
Alone, avast mail scanner doesn’t support SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connections but take a look here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=10428.0 to see how to set up secure email with avast!. Since SSL/TLS e-mail is encrypted and decrypted in the client, external virus scanners (including avast!) can’t read or scan it. The solution is to pass e-mail in and out un-encrypted from your client (Outlook Express, Thunderbird, …) to a proxy program (Stunnel) that does the actual ssl or tls encryption/decryption of the pop3/smtp e-mail and communicates directly with the ISP server on the appropriate ports. Another drivers (OpenSSL) are need as a library of encryption/decryption routines.
MS Outlook has a special pluggin for it. Other programs (pop3) will use Internet Mail Provider.