After updated to V 8 free, it seems that Thunderbird (v17.02) can neither send nor receive emails. Prior to the update, Thunderbird was working fine (imap, ssl 993 incoming, smtp starttls 587 outgoing).
There’s no message of any sort that Avast is blocking emails from coming or going. However, when attempting to send an email, Thunderbird does say that the email wasn’t sent for some unknown reason – aka, Avast isn’t identified as blocking the emails, but that’s what’s happening.
When trying to read emails, nothing happens – no emails are received, Thunderbird just sits there like there’s no emails when there could be hundreds.
The only real clue that this is all caused by Avast is everything works just fine when Avast email scanning is stopped. And I just happened on that because of frustration that nothing I did in Thunderbird changing settings was working. It’s like Avast just came in and stopped a perfectly working Thunderbird email program from working without any notice or actions required on my part.