Recently I download Avast! Home Edition and installed. I then have 2 problems associated with the “Internet Mail” and “Network Shield” protection.
Firstly, I’ve 2 email lost without any sign or notification. How I know I lost the 2 email is from my mail server logs. It was like that:
(1) I’m expected someone sending email to me;
(2) my email client (Thunderbird 1.5 beta2, imap) didn’t show any email from the expected one;
(3) I use WebMail (SmarterMail WebMail) in order to read my mailbox just in case but without luck;
(4) I then logon to my mail server (Windows 2003 Server, SmarterMail);
(5) Look through all the logs and found that the email have been delivered to my mailbox;
(6) I then look at the files on the server of my mailbox, the email could not be found;
(7) No trace of the email anymore as they were deleted and purged.
As I suspected Avast’s Internet Mail, so I removed the provider and so far so good.
Secondly, I’ve set up a ssh connection to my server and a tunnel of port 139 for Microsoft Networking sharing in order to copy file.
(1) Use mindterm 2.4.2 to connect to WinSSHD 4.06a (Windows Server 2000);
(2) Set up a tunnel of port 139;
(3) map a drive to remote server;
(4) start to copy files;
(4) The process executed for 1 or 2 seconds and suddenly a BSOD then my PC restarted.
(5) I did several times and also terminated the Network Shield. Same problem happened.
As I suspected Avast’s Network Shield, I removed the provider too. The problem didn’t happened again.
Here are my system details:
(1) PC is Windows XP Professional SP2 and fully patched;
(2) Servers are Windows Server 2000 SP4 and Windows 2003 Server SP1 and fully patched;
(3) Services on servers are WinSSHD 2.04a and SmarterMail 2.6.2119
(4) Avast! Home Edition 4.6.691 with On-Access Shield provider terminated
(5) VPS at the date of 11/4/2005
(6) Intel Pentium III GHz, 384 MB RAM
(7) ADSL 3000/800 to internet
(8) Thunderbird 1.5 beta2, SmarterMail WebMail
(9) McAfee 8.0i, McAfee Personal Firewall Plus 7, BitDefender 8 Free Edition
I could not provide further information as I’m reluctant to install back the providers. Email system is the most important to me.
Just hope to file these problems if they can help you in the future.
avast won’t delete emails (or files) without user intervention or the user sets up avast to move infected emails to the chest automatically (silent mode). If it has sent anything to the chest you you should see evidence of it there or in the avast logs.
sorry I don’t have any experience of SSH to suggest something.
So assuming you didn’t see any warnings and or you didn’t set avast to move to the chest, then I’m not sure where they may have gone
However, having two resident AVs can cause conflict rather than twice the protection. I think that BitDefender is OK because that can be set-up as on-demand scan only, but McAfee is resident.
So this could possibly be related to a conflict between two resident scanners.
Hopefully one of the Alwil Team will pick up on this thread.
I know more than one resident AV will be problematic. That why I run McAfee 8.0i as the resident, not for Avast’s On-access Shield. Because McAfee 8.0i is controlled by policy, I couldn’t disable or change anything.
Now I just run Avast Web Shield provider and sometimes run Avast as on-demand.
I’m not sure how this works out as I think that the web shield still uses the avast scanning engine, just in a different context, scanning prior to getting on to the HDD browser cache.
If you only run Web Shield, I don’t see how avast’s Internet Mail provider can do anything with your email, unless of course that statements relates to the current state and not what it was when you experienced a problem with missing email.
What is also at issue is not just having scanners disabled, but when avast installs if it detects another AV installed that may cause possible conflict, avast often doesn’t install fully. I don’t know how deeply McAfee gets into your registry, changing legacy keys, etc. If it is anything like NAV that stops avast installing fully.
avast isn’t designed to be run as an on-demand AV and to make it so, you effectively have to cripple it by disabling avast services (which you would need for Web Shield), which if running even though you might have disabled the Standard Shield, I feel there is potential for conflict.
So in order for web shield ashServ.exe must be running as a service and is effectively resident. Check windows services and see the description and also see the Dependencies for Avast Web Scanner, it needs ashServ running, so effectively avast is still resident even though you don’t use the Standard Shield on-access scanner.
Yes, the web shield need the scan engine to work. That is ashServ.exe and ashWebSv.exe are running.
Since I was not installing other providers (at installation time), the system only runs these 2 (may be 3 including the update) services. BitDefender has some services running in the background too.
When I use FileMon to see the activities, I saw ashServ.exe is actively read Avast’s database (non-stop!). ashWebSv.exe is only active when browsing. And they seemed not interfere with Mcshield.exe.
I may want to un-install Avast all together. Avast is a nice product, I should say. But my environment could not let me utilize it.
Avast is a nice product, I should say. But my environment could not let me utilize it.