smtp blocked

The last few days Avast has been blocking my outgoing messages on ports 25 and 587. Is there a way to fix this except for removing the ports from the redirect settings (which basically turns scanning off)? Why is this even happening now, when everything was working fine for months before that?

What is the full error text ?

using outlook I get an error number 10060. I don’t remember the text

If you get the error again you could try capturing a screenshot of the error window and attach it to a post.

Is it MS Outlook (and which version ?) or Outlook Express ?

I suspect it may be to do with SSL (secure email connections) as port 587 is a secure port, but commonly used with Thunderbird not Outlook.