I have read the support page regarding exporting mail certificates to Thunderbird from the legacy Antivirus product. There does not seem to be a method to export certificates from Avast One Essential.
However, in Thunderbird (version 91.8.0 /32-bit Windows 10) I can see in the certificates list that there is a certificate added for Avast Web/Mail Shield Root. So perhaps this process is not necessary now? If I view the certificate it says it is “generated by Avast Antivirus for SSL/TLS scanning”.
Gmail is broken. I cannot send/receive mail.
Sending mail results in the error:
Sending of the message failed.
Peer’s Certificate issuer if not recognized.
The configuration related to smtp.gmail.com must be corrected.
It appears the certificate is not being authenticated by the Avast Root certificate.
How does this get fixed? For now I have disabled the Email Shield.
Which version of Avast One do you have installed (Avast One > Account > About and Feedback)? If the latest 22.3, and you still have this issue, please provide a support file ID support (https://support.avast.com/article/Submit-support-file).
The article you referred me to talks about using the support portal, which is not available to me as a “free” user.
It then talks about creating a support file, but, as appears to be generally the case with your documentation, does not contain instructions for the Avast One product line. Am I supposed to use the “download and install” method of collection? Does this still work with Avast One?
Incidentally, the reason I switched from the legacy Antivirus product to this one, was that the old one started consuming almost all the available CPU resources. No amount of repairing or uninstall/reinstall remedied this. The new version was working well, but in the last few days that same high CPU load symptom has returned as well. Am I perhaps better off with a product not made by Avast?
I have the same problem, Thunderbird only works when disabling the Avast One shields.
I’m on a free version so I can’t make support requests, and all documented fixes seem to be for Antivirus, not Avast One…
I got distracted by other stuff, and the workaround of disabling the Email Guardian has been working. But, I’d still like to fix this properly. Since there is someone else with the same issue providing a log file, I won’t waste support time by sending another. But, please keep this thread updated if there is something I need to do to fix the issue, or if it will be fixed by a software update then advise when that update is available.
A bit more detail:
When I first installed Avast One Essential (around beginning of April) as a replacement for the old Free Antivirus, I did not initially have the problem with Gmail. It worked for about 10 days. Then the failures started. In troubleshooting, I did a complete uninstall of Avast One and deleted all the Avast root certificates from Thunderbird, including the old Avast Free ones, and the new Avast One certificate. After reinstalling Avast One, a single certificate showed up in Thunderbird, but the problem remained.
I have now tried running avastclear.exe to do a total uninstall. After the uninstall, I went back into Thunderbird and deleted the certificate, which does not appear to be deleted by avastclear. I then reinstalled again. The problem is still there.
So, back to disabling the Email Guardian. I hope you can find a fix.
Hi,
Could you please try to export the Mail Shield certificate from A1 and import it into Thunderbird?
Go to the folder C:\ProgramData\Avast Software\Avast\
(ProgramData folder might be hidden) and copy-paste the file with the name wscert.der to the desktop.
Import this certificate to Thunderbird. https://support.avast.com/en-en/article/91/#idt_020
Reboot Windows
This does appear to have fixed the problem. A few notes for you:
I was not able to import the certificate directly the way you described. I got an error from Thunderbird that the certificate was already installed. So, I deleted it and then imported it. I suspect the certificate was actually ok already and the import was not necessary. But, I could be wrong, because now I can’t re-create the original state to test that theory, because:
The support document you referenced describing the certificate import process contained an important additional step to look for Server certificates. The window did not look exactly as shown in the article. In the Servers tab of the Certificate Manager, Thunderbird does not identify the certificates visibly as belonging to Avast Web/Mail Shield. However, it did list both imap.gmail.com and imap.googlemail.com certificates. When I “viewed” these certificates I could see that they were created by Avast, but had a validity date that expired in 2019. After I deleted these certificates, and re-enabled Email Guardian, Thunderbird worked correctly. Yay! There was no need to reboot Windows as described in your instructions.
I am left with the question as to why the legacy Avast Antivirus did not have the same problem. If these certificates were present with an expiration date in 2019, shouldn’t that have caused a similar problem due to the certificates being expired?
Anyway, it works now. I think you need to modify the Avast ONE install process to find and delete these old Thunderbird certificates. Or, if that can’t be done, leave a conspicuous instruction for the user to find and delete them manually. Also, they should be removed by avastclear.exe.