AT&T uses pop.att.yahoo.com, port 995 for incoming and smtp.att.yahoo.com, port 465 for its outgoing, both with SSL set. I hadn’t changed any settings and suddenly a few months back I was no longer able to send/receive mail via Thunderbird. After frustrating experimentation, I found I had to resort to old, old settings (port 110 incoming and port 25 outgoing, with no SSL), to send/receive mail.
Naturally, I was blaming AT&T and or Thunderbird updates for the problem for months now, but it turns out it was Avast causing the problem. I’m guessing it must have happened on an Avast update at some point, (because I don’t even know what redirect means) and it happened to both my laptop & desktop simultaneously.
Reading other forums, it was suggested to check my firewall & anti-virus settings. Firewall settings were fine and knew to accept my mail automatically. I figured Avast would do the same, but I checked today and under On-Access Protection Control > Internet Mail > Customize > Redirect…I cleared the ports listed under the POP & SMTP boxes (blank). As I said, I don’t even know what redirect means, so I didn’t put the ports in there myself (and my computers are password protected and others in the house have there own computers to use, not networked to mine). I know it was under “Customize”, but I didn’t put ports in there.
In any case, that was what solved it for me. I am now back to SSL enabled, using ports 995 & 465 for my Thunderbird for AT&T mail. So anyone using Avast and having problems with Thunderbird send/receive (& there are many out there complaining), please check that the ports aren’t listed as above.
I hope this helps others out there… ;D And I also hope that by NOT having those ports listed in “redirect” was a bad thing for me to do…I don’t know what redirect means! Does this mean Avast is NOT scanning my inbound/outbound mail? If so, let me know. I think I read somewhere today that Avast does NOT scan SSL enabled mail? Why not? What’s the point of having Avast if it won’t scan for e-mail viruses with SSL enabled mail? ???
Hey, I’m new here and want to say thanks for this tip.
I’m a refugee from AVG … the latest version was killing my internet browsing (previously had no probs with it) and decided to jump ship. Avast seemed to work nicely on the web, but I could not get outlook to send or receive any messages. So I tried out what you’d done in your post and it seems to have fixed the problem.
But I wish I knew why this happens, because it can’t be every Outlook Express user with this glitch or I’d have tracked down a solution much quicker. I’ve been googling for a fix for quite a while before I got here.
Just wanted to add a little bit to this - it also helped me solve a huge problem! but I think I must have a different version of Avast than LTS as it took me forever to find those settings - they are named differently in my verson so here is what I found in my version:
Avast version 5.2.377 - click on the Real Time Shields tab on the left, then click the Mail Shield tab, then click the Expert Settings button on the right, then choose the SSL Accounts tab, and then you’ll have to go thru one by one and delete the entries… At first I didn’t delete them all thinking I was being careful… But I was still having problems on the ones I didn’t delete… so I wiped out the entire list and Avast automatically repopulates that list once you begin using your TBird again. Worked for both my gmail imap accounts and my pop3 accounts in Tbird…
I originally had all my email accounts chosen without SSL but Avast was “blocking” everything (I could check my webmail to see it was sitting there waiting). The problem began after I did several XP updates, plus a handful of hardware/software updates… So this worked - Thanks LTS for the solution! Shew!!!
Same here its Avast 5.0.412, it blocked port 993 “for specifc IMAP4 servers” and whitelisting the latter had not effect (AVAST autodetected gmail.com and ac.uk as ok, but not the one in question, eximap.mds.ad.dur.ac.uk, which youd expect to come under ac.uk) I reverted to my old copy of avast 4.7 and now all is working. This small problem caused a lot of wasted time
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There is no Avast version 5.2.377, so presumably you mean Avast version 5.0.377, in any case the latest Avast version is 5.0.426.
So I would advise both you and mmaammaa to update to the latest avast version 5.0.426 as there is little value in chasing a fault in an old version. There were many fixes in the later version so I don’t know if they might have had an affect on your problem, but it is best to have the current version in any case.
Probably will need to wait for Alwil to take a look at it. eximap.mds.ad.dur.ac.uk is a Microsoft Exchange server, not a normal internet mail server, and don’t know how 5.0 handles those.
Perhaps clutching at straws - If as sded says this is a Microsoft Exchange server, I would have though that it required MS Outlook or MS Exchange to use that.
So having said that:
are you using MS Outlook email client ?
or as this topic is related to thunderbird:
a. are you using thunderbird ?- b. if so, were you able to access this server using thunderbird before ?
It is an IMAP-enabled exchange server and I am now accessing it just fine using either tbird or pine while I run Avast Home 4.7. The problem truly seems to lie in the way Avast 5.x blocked access to the imap server. With Avast 4.7x it works just fine. Note that avast 5.x did not block access to other imap servers, which I could access all along (meaning check and send email) in both pieces of software while the problem persisted (while avast 5.x awas installed).
Presumably since you don’t have 5.0 installed, you can’t remember what the settings were in the avast! Real-time Shields, Mail Shield, Expert Settings, SSL Accounts details for that particular account. See image, whilst none of my accounts require SSL or use MS Exchange servers, perhaps it was incorrect in the Encryption setting Column for that account.