Thunderbird/Avast Conflict

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Following a recent update from avast I am unable to send emails with attachments. I can recieve attachments without a problem. If I temporarily stop AVAST email protection, attachments are sent without failure. I recieve the following error message:

Sending of message failed. The message could not be sent because connecting to smtp server failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing SMTP connections. Please verify that your SMTP server setting is correct and try again, or else contact your network admin.

2

Can you send emails without attachments?
Are the emails with attachments being scanned by avast or not?
Did you allow ashMaiSv.exe to connect through Internet into your firewall settings?

3

I can send emails without attachments. I don’t know if the attachments are being scanned. The firewall settings are fine unless following the latest AVAST update I had to change something?

4

To see if avast! is scanning emails, check one of these points:

  1. Is the avast icon (the special one of email scanning) be shown in the system tray?

  2. Is your email header with the lines X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS 0XXX-X, XX/XX/2005), Inbound message and X-Antivirus-Status: Clean? (Right click the message, choose Properties and Details)

  3. Are clean notes added at the bottom of the email? (Internet Mail provider settings)

Which firewall are you using?

5

I use Zone Alarm Firewall. I have the a icon in the system tray. Not sure what you mean by points 2 and 3. I am try to send emails so as far as I know there is no header and

6

I don’t know what clean notes are.

7

Left click the ‘a’ blue icon > Choose Internet Mail provider > Customize > on POP and SMTP tabs, click the option for clean notes.

8

Open your email program.
Right click over an email title (subject) and choose properties.
Go to Details tab.
There you should find X-Antivirus header if the email is being scanned…

9

I just wanted to tell that i got just the same problem without ZoneAlarm being installed.

But it looks like I can send Messages with small attachements (200KB) but not big ones (>1MB)

here my answers to your questions:

  1. Is the avast icon (the special one of email scanning) be shown in the system tray?
    Yes

  2. Is your email header with the lines X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS 0XXX-X, XX/XX/2005), Inbound message and X-Antivirus-Status: Clean? (Right click the message, choose Properties and Details)
    Yes

  3. Are clean notes added at the bottom of the email? (Internet Mail provider settings)
    No

As soon as i disable the scanning of outgoing mails everything works just fine.

I think there is some sort of timeout problem with the SMTP Server during the time it takes Avast to scann the Attachments.

10

In Thunderbird:
Tools > Options > Advanced … under the General tab see the connection timeout box (timeout value is in seconds).

For Thunderbird timeouts see: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=11596.msg106618#msg106618

Can you post if it helps or not?

11

I have tried the things suggested but no change. When I right click the subject header I do not get the option to go to properties or details.

12

I have the same problem. Inbound messages are properly scanned - outbound not at all (no X-Antivirus in the header), with or without attachments.

esootota,
to see your message headers in TBird, open the message, go to the View menu and selected Message Source. A new window will open with all the header data in.

About half way down the page, after “Content-transfer-encoding:”, you should see:
X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS XXXX-X, dd-mm-yyyy), Inbound message

followed by (hopefully!):
X-Antivirus-Status: Clean

HTH,
Alan

13

The view menu only gives - message security info which says status - unknown.

14

What version of Thunderbird are you using?
There are many more otions on my View Menu…

15

version 1.5

16

I have checked on inbound messages and I get the view source button with them and the X-Antivirus: avast! messgae is there.