I’m running Kerio personal firewall with avast (on win2k), and every now and then the avast e-mail scanner attempts to make an outgoing connection to a seemingly random IP on port 110. I don’t use any e-mail programs, and this will happen even when I’m not doing anything with regards to e-mail. The only programs I’m running that might have any reason to do anything with this port are Trillian and Azureus, but it seems like a bizarre port for them to be trying to do anything at all with, and I know I haven’t personally set up either to have anything to do with any port even remotely close to the 110 part of the spectrum.
Here are the details from the alert that just popped up:
[3/22/2005 1:42:26 AM]
Direction: outgoing
Local Point: 0.0.0.0, port 1364
Adapter: NDIS 5.0 driver
Remote Point: 0x3e42bc20.adsl.cybercity.dk [62.66.188.32], port pop3 [110]
Protocol: TCP
Any idea what’s going on here? Should I just let the scanner always make outgoing (internet) connections, permanently block it from doing so, or what?
Also, why I’m here, I’ll note that I’ve been having the problems with the avast webscanner, and even after that little patch I can still only set it on Normal scanning to be able to browse and even then it makes it pretty much impossible to deal with secure http browsing. This is true whether I’m using IE or firefox (most people seem to only be stating it as a firefox issue). Also, this is my 8th attempt to get this message to post to no avail. I’m extremely luck if I can even preview before I have to try and make a post all over again. Here’s hoping…
In fact, ashMaiSv.exe is safe to connect 110 but, as you stated, if you’re not using Internet Mail you can disable the avast provider (or even uninstall it through Control Panel).
Do you use any POP Checker application (notifier)?
Would using Trillian for my MSN and Yahoo! messaging/e-mail accounts count as a POP checker? Otherwise, no. I either use hotmail or telnet into my student account for e-mail. So, I do do something involving e-mail on the internet, just not when these outgoing connection alerts are popping up. Although, now that I’m bringing this up, I’m wondering if maybe it is ashMaiSv that makes it difficult for me to access hotmail accounts (the connection stalls after I try to log in; have a refresh 3-5 times for things to load up, and I can have similar problems when I try to send any e-mails). I had previously figured that it was an issue caused by a Windows Update fix, but after I learned that WebShield was interfering with my browsing all of the sudden…
Using your browser (web mail) can’t be a problem. Internet Mail provider can only interact with pop3/smtp server based accounts.
Note, MS Outlook plugin of avast can ‘handle’ hotmail but only into the full Outlook (not the OE).
I can’t be sure of more… sorry, I’m not an expert on it…