I have been contacted by many users having problems with the new 4.5 and their email clients. I myself have lost email scanning on outbound mail for all 3 of my clients: Outlook Express (was working great with 4.1), Pegasus and Thunderbird .7 on my W98 and ME machines.
After 3 days, I have given up trying to manually configure them. Even when I use the Mail Protection Wizard, it configures the clients, but SMTP still fails to authenticate.
As has been said by other users, shutting down Avast restores outbound mail whereas firewall shutdown does not affect the condition at all.
I think that it should be up to the user now whether 4.1 or 4.5 should be installed.
I would like the Avast Team to comment on how this matter can be resolved, and consider making 4.1 available temporarily.
I don’t know,if it’s a good idea.For me avast! 4.5 has not been tried enough.Beta has been used only by forum member’s.
I’ve the same problem as yours Techie .I’ve recommended Avast! to many people,but i’ve not your abilities for reply them
running avast with outbound scanning turned off 4.5.531 as if I turn it on my mail client won’t send email and then times out from the ISP and Avast itself reports its own timeout. Tried endless suggested ‘tricks’ but none works so far. XPhome SP2, ZoneAlarm,Turnpike mail client, BTinternet ISP, Broadband.
My personal experience with 4.5 (from the 1st beta till now)
Problems when using Opera mail and the first beta (solved with the second beta)
Still problems with the screensaver (had that already with 4.1, sofar not solved)
Problem with rar files containing many files (80+, solved)
I know that the problems with Thunderbird (imap) are caused by the way TB is handling the mail, but there is a solution for.
Another thing I have noticed is that a lot of people using XP and Outlook (Express) and somehow the mail setup in avast4.ini seems to be wrong. I have tried to replicate the problem on my systems but wasn’t able to on none of them.
Only this morning I though I had it replicate when the mail wasn’t working, but it turned out that my ISP was working on their mailservers
4.1 back (temporary)? I would say no. To me it feels like giving blood to someone who is bleeding, but not doing anything to stop the bleeding.
For me no problems at all with the official release of 4.5, I have never used any of the beta versions and waited patiently for the official release.
I even forgot to run MPW to remove mail protection (i.e. set everything back to normal) before I downloaded the official 4.5 release (manual update). Every thing went ok, all OE accounts set back to as they should. No problems sending email with or without attachments.
It would be interesting to find out if people who have installed 4.5 as their first installation of avast (e.g. never had 4.1) if they experienced any of the problems.
I don’t think you can not unwind the clock. The more people who install 4.1 and have to manually setup their email accounts to work with avast, the more we are simply storing up potential for future problems. The fact that they will also lose out on some of the enhancements/protection is also a factor.
I can understand the points made here, but look at it this way…
If users cannot configure their system using Avast and have no protection (usually on the SMTP side from the posts), isn’t it better to revert to a version that worked with their OS then leave them stranded???
Right now, I for one have no outbound scanning on my ME or W98 machines which I need to test programs and work problems for users. 4.1 worked fine on both before the update.
I have had to revert to previous program releases when I could not get a new release of a program to work properly.
I don’t like trading one set of email problems in 4.1 (which were solved ) for another in 4.5! That’s not going forward…is it?
The new features of 4.5 are of no use if a user can’t get it to work properly.
I feel terrible when a user contacts me with email trouble and I can’t even solve my own any more.
What I don’t understand is why the team at Avast is not saying much about a solution here!
It makes sense to “wait” only if help is forthcoming. Thunderbird is not a “rarely” used email client. It has become very popular.
Good point, Techie. I’ve had no problems with 4.5 (so far) myself, but that’s just me.
And it’s very common, in forums all over the net, to see recommendations to get specific earlier versions of whatever software because of widespread problems with the most current version. Sometimes it even goes so far as a warning to avoid using the most current version.
Techie, I understand your point but - to make long story short, our plan is to fix all the problems instead of retreating to the old version.
I believe the 4.5.536 build (availble from the sticky thread in the avast Home/Pro forum section) is already very very stable one and fixes virtually all the problems (except for those that are intimately related to 3rd party firewalls; that is, which are simply incompatibilities with 3rd party apps).
We’ll be releasing it as a public (official) build probably during tomorrow.
No, I think that any copy of 4.1 must come from Alwil.
I may have a copy of an early release of 4.1 but need to insure that the new vps updates will work with it. I still want to know why things got messed up and why the normal fixes do not work.
UPDATE:
My Thunderbird .9 is being scanned by Avast both ways now. I uninstalled 531, and reinstalled it completely, then updated again. It seemed to take much longer than when originally installed, but once done, I rebooted and configured TB manually.
Now it works. I really don’t know what happened but some file must have become corrupted.
Unfortunately, OE still does not connect on the SMTP side, but it was only used as backup.
I must say that I did not have any problems at all using Thunderbird 0.9 and Avast Home 4.1 using Wins XP Home SP1, then SP2. My incoming and outgoing mail was scanned just fine then. Now with version 4.5 once again no problems with it scanning incoming/outgoing mail using the same Thunderbird 0.9 version. I waited until both of these official versions were out of their Beta stage before using them and have had absolutely no probems with e-mail, scanning, or any other issues with e-mail. In fact, not having any problems with any other programs using Avast 4.5 just as I was not having any problems with any other programs using Xp home sp1 and sp2 with either Avast 4.1/4.5 versions. Guess I am just lucky or something else may be the difference??
Sometimes we never figure out why a release works with one system and not another identical system configuration.
I had W9x, ME and XP working fine with OE, TB, Pegasus and 4.1. The update to 4.5 seemed to cause difficulty.
XP is fine, ME with TB is fine but not OE, W9x has to be checked again. I think OE was working but not Pegasus.
All the problems users are having are configuration related but what makes things difficult is that the configuration for one client does not always work with an identical client on another machine.
Basically, we found the following issues in 4.5.523:
Windows 9x: OUTGOING mail does not work if SMTP server requires authorization
Windows NT/2K/XP: big problems with mail in conjunction with a number of 3rd party firewalls. Namely: Norton Personal Firewall, PC-Cillin. Sometimes also Sygate, Outpost or even ZoneAlarm…
OTHER configurations have had no severe problems AFAWK (except for misconfigured firewall rules etc).
Techie101, Yep I understand exactly what can happen as you say. There sometimes is no rhyme or reason for things to act as they do. I am also using Sygate P.F. version 5.6. Good luck.
After Vlk announced that 4.5.539 would shortly be released. Plus he didn’t see the backward step to 4.1 being an option, I felt it right to remove my post so people didn’t go looking.
Sometime ago I opened a thread asking the Alwil staff to clarify what problems can be identified, which ones remain and which ones are resolved and also still to be resolved. IMHO it would have given me (if I am alone in this) some idea of situation and exactly what problems I was fruitlessly chasing. Unfortunately that thread died a death with the Alwil staff.
quote Vlk... I believe the 4.5.536 build (availble from the sticky thread in the avast Home/Pro forum section) is already very very stable one and fixes virtually all the problems
Great, but the title of that thread is… “BETA 4.5.536 - hopefully solving many of the issues…?” ie a previous BETA was also supposed to fix problems!!!, and that isn’t knocking the good work Alwil do, it is just unfortunate that it’s not quiet happening as hoped.
quote Vlk... fixes virtually all the problems (except for those that are intimately related to 3rd party firewalls; that is, which are simply incompatibilities with 3rd party apps).
“Simple incompatibilities”, sorry they seem like quiet important problems that are still to be resolved. Personally, I don’t see the point in going from one BETA to another where there are still known issues.
I’m glad that ‘some’ versions work for ‘some’ people, but like I too have already said in a previous thread… I would like to go back to a known good, stable version until 4.5 is fully sorted.
"Simple incompatibilities", sorry they seem like quiet important problems that are still to be resolved. Personally, I don't see the point in going from one BETA to another where there are still known issues.
By “simple incompatibilites” I meant those that will hardly ever be sorted out simply because the 3rd party app uses a similar mechanism of working as avast and the OS was simply not designed to acommodate more than one such a component (this relates to the way the transparent mail scanner works).
Very similar situation as with other av/fw or fw/fw combinations.
To sum up, 4.5.536 fixes, to our best knowledge, all the issues we wanted to fix for now. No other program update is planned for the next month.
