Lele, I am not an expert on antivirus programs or specifically avast! I have spent a lot of time focussing on the spam problem in the past and have learned quite a lot about mail proxies that way. Avast acts a mail proxy for the generic mail clients (such as OE and Thunderbird)and so one setting you need to look at is the pop3 server timeout in your mail client. Depending on your internet connection speed and the largest file you expect to get you may need to adjust that. I typically set it to 2 or 2 and 1/2 minutes because I do get 9 megabyte files as attachments sometimes. (On a dial up connection I would expect to have to make that timeout a lot more.)

I have not tried tweaking avast during this test period since I am trying to replicate the overrun problem and have left all my settings as I described above but they seem to be working fine.

My experience so far indicates that email antivirus detection is much more important then I thought. While the number of viruses in emails is quite smalll compared to the amount of spam emails one receives, actually the percenatge of viruses in non-spam emails is quite high based on what I have seen in the last few weeks.

I started getting concerned about this recently because of all the press on the new viruses making the rounds and was frankly amazed after I installed avast at how many were actually coming into my inbox. Prior to having avast installed I was simply deleting what appeared to be suspicious emails but never really kept count. The number of infected email borne files in my avast “chest” is quite startling! That is why I am evaluating avast for deployment to other workstations at my company.

Once I have completed testing for the overrun I will begin tweaking (if necessary) and wil be glad to share my experience then.

Hopefully that will be real soon.

Test results for the last 13 hours: 3258 emails scanned and 40 infected files and no overruns encountered yet. (In order to accelerate the test I have set up some customer support accounts to also come to my account and am getting overwhelmed with all the detected spam (Spampal) and viruses (avast)!)

Sean D