Thunderbird 12.0.1 won't send my e-mail

I can’t send my email from thunderbird 12.0.1. I just loaded Avast last night and this is the first time I’ve tried to send an e-mail. My incoming mail comes through just fine but I get the following message every time I try to send an e-mail. I even unmarked it in Avast so it wouldn’t scan my e-mail, incoming or outgoing but still now I’m getting this error message:

An error occurred sending mail: The mail server sent an incorrect greeting: Cannot connect to SMTP server 207.69.189.205 (207.69.189.205:25), connect error 10051.

does it work if you disable avast mail shield ?

The first thing I did was go look through the help doc and find the shield for the mail and clicked incoming and outgoing and mark them off. Then I tried to send the message. I received the message again (from my previous post here) then received this one when I closed out the first error message:

Sending of message failed.
The message could not be sent because the connection to SMTP server smtpauth.earthlink.net was lost in the middle of the transaction. Try again or contact your network administrator.


Is it just me or are these verification codes you have to type in to post,a pain in the … I got the first wrong and clicked go back and I had to retype my whole note because the it was now blank. OK, trying it a 5th time, audio didn’t work with me either and I swear I wrote down every word. This is like trying to break into Ft. Knox. Now it’s saying I already posted this but that’s funny since it’s told me six times now that their was an error and I needed to retry the verification code.

So I take it no one knows how to solve my problem with Avast not allowing me to send my e-mail through Thunderbird?

Does the earthlink.net account that you are trying to send email require SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) ?
Given the SMTP server smtpauth.earthlink.net has auth[entication] I suspect it might be using SSL or Encrypted Password, either of these may cause avast to be unable to intercept the email so it can be scanned before being sent. But that would usually result in an avast notification it is unable to scan that secure email

If earthlink.net doesn’t require SSL, avast may well be trying to connect using a secure port and connection. Check the avastUI, Real-Time Shields, Mail Shield, Expert Settings, SSL Accounts and try changing the Encryption to None if it is set to SSL.

If earthlink.net does require SSL, but uses port 25 for the secure connection (which is a bit of a standards no, no), then try changing the Mail Shield, Expert Settings, SSL Accounts and try changing the Encryption to TLS if it is set to SSL.

Also see - avast! 6.x, 7.x: SSL Problems The Mail Shield may not scan some e-mails - see https://support.avast.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=842. Whilst this is an old article and mentions avast6 it is relevant for avast7 also.

I tried your suggestions to no avail. But I did notice that Avast shows my outgoing port for earthling.net as being 25 but my Thunderbird shows it being 587?? But I see no place in Avast where I could change the port number. I have encryption both “no” on that page on Avast. I tried the other stuff but it still wouldn’t go. I guess as a last resort, I could call Earthlink and ask them if they can figure it out?

Well if you read the information on that link I gave, it shows that you can’t have that port set in your thunderbird account settings as that is a secure port and avast can’t redirect the email into its proxy to scan and then send it using StartTLS, so it is sent securely.

This is why I asked if earthlink.net required SSL to send email (as it looked by the SMTP server of smtpauth.earthlink.net seemed to indicate). So try setting the thunderbird earthlink.net smtp port to 25 and the avast SSL Account one to 587 and see if that works ?

The other aspect you also need to check is in the thunderbird account settings is the password send securely, if so you would have to change that also or avast can’t redirect.

I rather doubt earthlink would have a clue about avast and how it handles secure email redirection.

Sorry David if I didn’t understand it exactly the first time. I’m OK with my computer until it starts getting complicated (well complicated for me). I find it odd though that my “free version” worked just fine but now all of a sudden I down load the paid for version and it goes crazy. I’ll go change the port and see what happens. Now I just have to go find it again. I’ll update, I lost a sister last week so I just haven’t had the patience to work with it, let alone check here to see if there was a solution.

Ok, I made the changes, but then it gave me a new message:

An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: Please configure your mail client to use authentication… Please check the message recipient jmwalsh1@mindspring.com and try again.

BUT then I went back into Thunderbird and reset the authentication and the message was sent. So my fingers are crossed. Is there anything I should turn back on that I set off in Avast now that it seems to be sending my mail? I always pull my mail into the Earthlink e-mail web site, scan what I want and don’t want and then I download just what I want. Earthlink is very good at scanning for viruses as my mail comes into the website and they’ve caught a few things for me. And I’m also careful what actually gets downloaded to Thunderbird.

Yes, you would still require authentication as avast would use that when setting up the secure connection.

Are you seeing that avast is scanning your email ?
Check the avastUI, Real_time Shields, Protection status, Mail Shield, you should see activity recorded 99/0 (99 being the number of email scanned and 0 being the number of detections).