A friend of mine just got a new computer and I helped him installing Awast Home-edition. The computer is running Windows XP. We configured his Outlook Express 6.0 and checked everything was working. Sending and receiving of email seemed to be working just fine.
Later we found out it was impossible to send emails with attachments. Not even small attachments like a 64k jpg-image would go through. When trying to send the message drops to his outbox, but then stays there forever until a timeout-error occures.
For a long time I belived it had to be the Avast mailscanner who was causing the trouble. First I tried disable scanning of outbound mail (in the Internet Mail section). That didn’t help. >:( So then I tried turning off Awast completely (the bottom-last menuitem in the popup-menu when right-clicking the A-icon in system-tray). That didn’t help either. ???
Is there any chance of this still being a problem caused by the Awast scanner? Feel free to suggest whatever tip or idea you guys might have…
John, for sure Outlook Express and avast! works perfectly togheter and I send attachments every day, no trouble.
Besides the OE timeout, maybe avast! timeout provider too. Check into Advanced tab of Internet Mail provider settings.
Other possibility is testing the two kinds of emails (txt and html).
What is the exactly error message that you’re receiving?
Are you using Gmail or any other SSL protected email account?
First I tried increasing the timeouts for both OE and Avast. That didn’t make a difference. It still wouldn’t work. Then I tried uninstalling Avast completely and was hoping that would do the trick, but that didn’t help either. It’s still not possible to send email with attachments, but works fine without.
Well, at least this helped me understand that my problem is not related to the Avast antivirus program.
I have now installed Avast again. The only error-message we receive in OE is something like "The SMTP server did not respond for 5 minutes. Do you want to wait longer or abort? The actuall message is in Norwegian, so I guess it wouldn’t help you guys much if I told you the excact words.
I guess I should post my problem in some other forum since it seems to have nothing to do with Avast, but I’m still open to whatever good idea people in here might have.
John,
Please insert the line Log=20
to file C:\Program Files\ALWIL Software\Avast4\Data\avast4.ini under [MailScanner] for detailed logging.
Then send one mail (or retrive mail if incoming mail is the problem), which will generate the log file. After that, post the last lines of the log file C:\Program Files\ALWIL Software\Avast4\Data\log\aswMaiSv.log. Thanks.
I am using Mozilla Thunderbird Email program version 1.5RC1.
I have verified that the settings are correct and sending a file with a 620 Kb file works normal.
I have received a 2 Mb mpeg file and tried to send it to a friend and I get the following failure:
Sending of message Failed.
The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP server xxxx-xxxxx.xx.xx.com Failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing SMTP connections. Please verify that your SMTP server setting is correct and try again or else contact your network administrator.
I have been doing some futher testing and found if I turn off (avast) scanning of outgoing mail. The large file will send with no problem.
With outbound scanning on TB displasy status as deliverying email and progess will be extremely fast. Then I get the send file failure
With outbound scanning off TB displasy status as deliverying email and progess will be extremely slow and status will change to email sent.
Do you use a firewall? Which one? I’m assuming that you give rights to connect to ashmaisv.exe as you can send/receive mail.
Tunderbird does not ‘send’ the mail. It sends to your own computer, to avast scanner, then the email is sent.
The first part is quick (sending to avast scanner), the other, the scanning, is slower.
I’m sorry to ever fault a reply from Tech (who is almost always right) and it is probably just a matter of language.
When your outbound mail is not scanned by avast then Thunderbird connects to the smtp server and sends the mail and you see the slow orderly progression of delivery of mail to the smtp server (assuming that Thunderbird is an approved outbound process of your firewall - if you use one).
When your outbound mail is scanned by avast then Thunderbird (or any old mail client - avast does not have any idea which mail client you use - in most cases) is fooled into thinking it has connected to the smtp server when in reality it has connected to avast in your own system. So you see the very rapid delivery of the message to avast, which caches the message in your system and then scans the message. This all happens very fast since it is all inside your system (sorry Tech - the scanning by avast is not slow - it is very fast). The message has still not gone anywhere, so now avast has to take over the role of your mail client and sent the message to the smtp server and then send back the final acknowledgement to your mail client (in this case Thunderbird). This is when you see the looooong pause at the end of the message transmission in Thunderbird while avast is really sending the message to the server. So, avast can only send the message out if the Internet Mail provider (ashmaisv.exe) is an approved outbound process of your firewall - if you use one.
That’s what happens.
I suppose you now want to know why you are having a problem.
You have not (as friend Tech has asked) indicated whether the 2 Meg message is delivered when avast scanning is turned off. Remember that some ISPs will not allow you to send such large messages from them, and some other ISPs will not accept such messages sizes.
Perhaps you can tell us the type/speed of the Internet connection you are using. It is possible that Thunderbird just gets tired of waiting for the acknowledgement and times out on a message of this size (if it does then I believe there is a Thunderbird tweak that may work).
Since you report that sending a 620Kb file works without problem I have to assume the you do not have a problem with approval of outbound sending by the avast Internet Mail provider. It may be a timeout issue because of the message size. So, knowing whether sending this message size with avast outbound scanning turned off is successful is important.
With apologies to friend Tech - and awaiting your answers to Tech’s questions and mine.
Maybe you can add the following line to the [MailScanner] section of \data\avast4.ini:
Log=20
Then generate some traffic, simulate the problem (i.e. force the avast mail scanner to time out by sending an email with attachment) and then post here the contents of the file \data\log\aswMaiSv.log
What you haven’t said is what email program you use?
You could temporarily disable the scan outbound email for very large attachments, send and enable. This is just an option and resolving the problem not the symptom is the ideal.
The email programs timeout is more likely to be the first one to trigger, more so having extended the avast timeout. You also need to extend the timeout in your email client (which one).
there are lots of references to lotsofjunk’s email client (Thunderbird) in the discussion.
lotsofjunk,
as you probably know, email cannot send files exactly as they are and they have to be encoded so that they can be sent through the mail system as text and then get decoded back to the original file by the receiver’s email. That encoding makes the file quite a bit bigger than its original size and means even more to be sent.
Even with cable systems the upload side is generally much slower than the download side. You seem to be disconnecting after a minute of sending, I’m assuming that Thunderbird may just be terminating the connection (though I’m puzzled by the one minute since the default timer in TBird is 45 seconds).
Anyway I’ll suggest one tweak that could speed up the outbound transmisson of the message blocks by avast and an extension to the timeout in Tbird (unfortunately Tbird does not provide this function in the user interface).
First for avast:
edit the avast4.ini file in the avast4\data folder.
In the [MailScanner] section add a line:
SendInBlockingMode=1
and save the file.
For Thunderbird timeout:
You can do this by creating (or adding to) a file called user.js in your Thunderbird profile folder. Add the lines:
Oops, I’ve either got to read further back or change these glasses ;D Ahh that reminds me I have got to pick up my new glasses tomorrow.
Alan, how does the SendInBlockingMode=1 tweak speed up the outbound transmisson of the message blocks by avast?
I assume this would be good for dial-up also?
Back in May another user (hgratt) noticed that he was not getting the optimum transmission of email on his very high speed connection. The sending of his email (using the Mozilla mail client if I recall) was slower when being scanned by avast than when not.
I got interested and did some testing and found that with OE the difference with/without avast was very small but that using my mail client Thunderbird (also a Mozilla product) that the difference with/without was pronounced. It seemed that the Mozilla products transmitted email much faster than OE or than avast itself.
Vlk got interested and took a look at the code in avast and declared it old and not up to avast standards. It was rewritten and was speeded up dramatically.
However to remove all delays between block sends and utilize high speed links optimally Vlk decided that the ini setting would be needed. With that setting avast monopolizes the system a bit more to get the message sent as fast as the upload link will allow. Given the speed differences between dial up and the higher end of some cable and dsl offerings I do not think this setting would do much for a dial up user.
I made the following changes and the large attachment will now send with scanning outbound on. I also added another large attachment and it worked also.
Thanks for the help and great product.
First for avast:
edit the avast4.ini file in the avavast4\data folder.
In the [MailScanner] section add a line:
SendInBlockingMode=1
and save the file.
For Thunderbird timeout:
You can do this by creating (or adding to) a file called user.js in your Thunderbird profile folder. Add the lines:
