oX800CCOE error

About 50% of the time I cannot connect Outlook Express…Port 995 Socket error 10061, ox800CCOE error. I have XP, att.yahoo.com, SSL required, 4.8 Avast Home, malwarebytes, & microsoft firewall. Thanks. p.s. keep it simple, please.

Presumably you tried to add port 995 to the avast redirected ports in the Internet Mail settings ?

This won’t work as avast can’t handle secure SSL/TLS connections, this will be different when avast 5.0 is released (in beta testing at present) as it should be able to deal with this issue.

Thank you. No I did not do anything to the ports.

Well if you didn’t make any changes to the avast Internet Mail provider then avast isn’t even monitoring/scanning it as it can’t scan SSL/TLS secure encrypted email. That is the whole point of secure email to keep prying eyes out, including AVs.

So there would appear to be something else going on outside of avast.

Can you post the full text of the error and not just a small part ?

Have (or did) you another Anti-Virus installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ?
Whilst this in theory shouldn’t be an issue as avast ‘shouldn’t’ be trying to scan the email, stranger things have been known to happen with another AV installed or remnants left behind.

Yes, I will post the full reply as soon as I get one—today it is working. I had Norton 360 before and deleted it thru the add/delete feature of XP.

Well since it is now working, I would say it is more likely to have been an intermittent problem at the email server end and nothing to do with avast or it would be one state, working or not working.

Whilst this may not be anything related to AV/remnants conflict, it may be worthwhile ensuring all remnants are gone.

A link worth looking at, which is a program removal tool that can remove the remnants of a number of different Norton Programs:
Removing your Norton program using SymNRT
Or ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/removal_tools/Norton_Removal_Tool.exe

Thank you very much for your help!! I thought that since the problem started after downloading Avast that might be the cause. I will use the website you suggested.

No problem, glad I could help.

Welcome to the forums.