I’ve been using avast since last October and I’m generally very happy with it. It’s reliable and detects viruses in short it does what it says on the tin. However recently I wanted to e-mail some photo’s so I zipped them into a zip file of about 6MB and using Thunder Bird 1.5 I pressed the button and Thunderbird went through the motions and after a short while I received an error message concerning my SMTP server. The mesage reads:
The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP server SMTP.freenetname.co.uk failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing connections. Please verify that your SMTP server setting is correct and try again or else contact your network administrator.
Also if I hover my mouse over the mail scanner icon it comes up with:
Now if I disable the smtp mail scanning function I can send large attachments if I enable it I am limited to about 1MB. I suspect that the gr.SMTP0.global.net.uk is the culprit, if so how do I go about changing it to my ISP’s SMTP server.
My PC is:
AMD Semperon 2800+
756MB Ram
2 x Western Digital hard drives
Windows XP Home
With a large attachment I would have thought that you would get a Timeout warning, ‘Do you want to wait, Yes or No,’ rather than it fail.
Are you getting Connection Timeout warning rather than a failure ?
Is there any attachment size restriction for your ISP’s email server ?
If this is correct then no matter what you do with avast you won’t succeed unless you can get the attachment size below the ISP’s limit. Reduce the image resolution,
To temp disable outbound scan do this (see image) or temporarily pause the Internet Mail provider…
Now if I disable the smtp mail scanning function I can send large attachments if I enable it I am limited to about 1MB. I suspect that the gr.SMTP0.global.net.uk is the culprit, if so how do I go about changing it to my ISP's SMTP server.
I'm sorry I don't understand this, the gr.smtp0.global.net.uk shouldn't have been touched by avast, with XP the email scanning is transparent and your email account settings should be the same as before you installed avast ?
Is gr.smtp0.global.net.uk what the smtp server should be in your email account for sending email ?
thanks for the prompt answer. I’m not getting the timeout message at all, just the error message detailed. My ISP has no limits they claim and their smtp server is smtp.freenetname.co.uk. If I turn the out bound scanner or use outlook express I don’t have a problem.
If I turn the out bound scanner or use outlook express I don't have a problem.
Now I’m confused, I would have thought thunderbird would work in the same way as OE, can you send and receive email using tbird without attachments and the internet mail provider enabled ?
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 > 1Mb) and then post here the contents of the file \data\log\aswMaiSv.log
Has anybody actually been able to find the IP address of SMTP.freenetname.co.uk? My dns search says it cannot be found - perhaps that is why Thunderbird could not connect to it.
That is the strange thing Alan, ralphred1965 can send and receive email from Thunderbird, so I would have thought his email account settings in thunderbird would be OK otherwise he wouldn’t be able to send anything from that account let alone those with attachments below 1MB.
You have confirmed what I suspected about the redirected email server and global.net.uk, perhaps that is where the problem lies. If there is a long delay perhaps the redirected server connection is dropped or it doesn’t allow large attachments.
I don’t know who this email server redirection plays out with the connection timeouts as ralphred1965 mentions he isn’t getting them. All very strange.
I think the best next step would be to go back to the suggestion from Tech earlier i the thread on creating a detailed email connection log and letting us try to better understand where the problem might be.
By the way David, you are correct in believing that there is no logical difference in the way Thunderbird and OE send mail, they are both following the rules of SMTP and the avast Internet Mail provider doesn’t care about which mail client is being used - it just intercepts the SMTP calls.
It’s true that avast mail scanner can cause timeout of mail client when sending large attachments. Unlike some other mail clients, Thunderbird is not able to continue waiting when its timeout expires and just produces this inappropriate error message. So the only chance is to increase the timeout in TB or disable SMTP scanning in avast.
In the upcoming avast update, outbound message handling is modified so that it will not cause this problem.
The gr.SMTP0.global.net.uk is just the name provided by DNS server as reverse lookup of the SMTP server’s IP address. Avast does not know the original DNS name, so it queries for some DNS name, just not to show the user the bare IP address. But the translated name does not always match the original name.