system
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I’ve tried disabling and enabling mail protection using the wizard. I closed Outlook Express every time. I’m not sure if the Outlook/Exchange provider is still on. I don’t use Outlook, so I’ll try disabling that when I get home. 
Disabling mail protection wizard may be good temporary solution
Well, what I did is change the SMTP server from 127.0.0.1 to mail.chello.nl, so outgoing mail is not sent to avast anymore, but incoming mail is still retrieved through avast.
Btw, do you maybe have some software firewall that has mail protection features and could interfere with avast! internet mail provider ? Any info could be of help. Also, do you run hardware firewall and what make and model ? MTU settings sometimes could cause problems with sending/receiving e-mails... of course, if the are improperly set...
Im using the built-in firewall of WinXP SP2. I'll see if I can configure it for avast. My mobo does have a hardware firewall, but as far as I know it is not active. I can doublecheck this. I'm not sure about MTU settings. How can I configure those? On my old computer (Win98SE) I downloaded some utility to automatically apply good MTU settings. Should I try doing the same on my new machine with WinXP?