I’ve been using Avast for quite some time, but a change in the Outlook virus scanner integration has been bugging me out of my mind: Whenever a message is marked in an Outlook folder (not only when opened, but just highlighted in the folder), the message is scanned. This might sound innocent, but when marking a 1000+ message sized folder causes minutes of Avast frantically rechecking all these messages for the n’th time, it no longer is. Please. please, please, how can I turn off “virus scan on message mark”??? It is probably like this for a reason (maybe it is more secure than only scan on open), but I will rather live a slightly dangerous, yet functional Outlook life rather than suffer this any more.
Qualify my reply first ingeba, as I don’t use Outlook.
If you right click the avast! blue ball in your system tray, you have the option to pause or stop the providers. Perhaps pausing or stopping the Outlook/Echange provider might give you a quick solution until someone more knowledgeable comes along with another post.
As I said, I don’t use the programme, so I might be way off base about this
But you can try first, if you want, check your settings: avast! could scan just the unread messages (right click the ‘a’ blue icon > on-access protection > choose MS Outlook plugin at left and Customize at right > browse the settings and change what you need/want)
You are quite right in that only unread messages will be scanned on highlight – I hadn’t noticed that and the oprtion was ticked. There is no option to “scan on open only” however, which is what I want. I subscribe to a number of mailing lists and in some there are hundreds (yes, even tousands) of unread messages (I won’t even blush) and they are scanned every time they are highlighted. If I by mistake mark too many of them (or if I want to move them to another Outlook folder), I will have to use Task Manager to abort Outlook.
Are there other ways to prevent this from happening? It seems little point in Avast rescanning messages that are not being opened over and over.
Inge:
Did you try to upgrade to 4.5 as Technical Suggested?
I can’t guarantee that it will change anything because I don’t use Outlook.
There are however many changes in the new version and unlike most beta’s, Ive found this one rock solid. ;D
Is your PREVIEW PANE option in Outlook enabled ? If it is, you may wanna try to disable it. That way, if you have preview pane open in Outlook, your messages are “open” as soon as you click on them. If you disable preview pane, you will have to double-click on messages to open them in new window, but at least, your messages won’t be scanned as soon as you click on them… Having Preview pane closed is always good additional precaution from opening some suspicious attachments… just by looking at mail subject and sender of the mail, you can easily decide do you wanna open it or just erase it…
I know it’s not the best solution but you can set a message to be ‘read’ after 1 (or perhaps zero) seconds after being highlighted… Will it help? Did you try what Sasha said?
Maybe the fact that MS Outlook has a plugin and not a provider (like Internet Mail of Outlook Express and other pop3/smtp email clients) makes the difference :-\
