In the instructions it says modify one’s avast4.ini file. Somewhere mine is still not correct. I should set for pop SSL and smtp TLS for googlemail (well one does with AVG so i assume Avast is similar) - but i can’t see where to do it.
[MailScanner]
;
;;;default settings commented out and replaced with TBP settings
;
;;;SmtpListen=127.0.0.1:25
;;;PopListen=127.0.0.1:110
SmtpListen=127.0.0.1:465
PopListen=127.0.0.1:995
ImapListen=127.0.0.1:143
NntpListen=127.0.0.1:119
UseDefaultSmtp=0 DefaultPopServer=pop.googlemail.com DefaultSmtpServer=smtp.googlemail.com
ShowTrayIcon=1
AutoSetProtection=0
;;;PopRedirectPort=110 changes back to default after running? see below
;;;SmtpRedirectPort=25
PopRedirectPort=110
SmtpRedirectPort=25
ImapRedirectPort=143
NntpRedirectPort=119
IgnoreAddress=
IgnoreLocalhost=1
AutoRedirect=1
Apologies if i’ve missed something basic - i have looked and couldn’t see anything after a ‘search’.
avast can’t directly handle SSL/TLS because it is outside the email client and by the time avast scans the email is encrypted. So in this respect it is different to AVG.
You can use a third party application like STunnel to act as an interface and then avast can scan the content before it is encrypted.
I felt that Gmail didn’t need scanning but thought it worth looking into as a precaution. AVG produced a glitch and wouldn’t scan first ‘GET’ and yet second time fine. I thought i’d try Avast but there is quite alot i’ve got to go through.
4/5 years ago i gave up email clients believing that if one used webmail you couldn’t get viruses as you didn’t download. However, that is apparently not the case.
While Gmail says it scans for viruses and malware as they don’t say what they use - one wonders! However, as while Thunderbird is running it doesn’t allow an executable to execute - i reckon one can get away with a manual scan. I will study the links you’ve given but it seems a bit complicated for me. Another thing to bare in mind is how much slower it is for getting /sending email.
It seems that the AVG folks have effectively built the equivalent of STunnel into their mail scanner so you can choose to have the AVG mail scanner manage the secure connections to the mail client while allowing the mail between the mail client and the secure connection manager to flow un-encrypted inside your system and be scanned. This is precisely the same way that STunnel works. To me this means that, at least for mail scanning, AVG is ahead of avast in making life easier for its users.
If you do want your Googlemail/Gmail received by Thunderbird and scanned then there is another alternative to STunnel. You can use the Thunderbird Webmail extensions to retrieve your GMail for you - with the Thunderbird GMail extension and unchecking one box in the Internet Mail provider of avast you can receive and send GMail and have it scanned by avast as a regular POP account. Oh, and getting this mail scanned is much easier in avast than the way it has to be done in AVG.
If you do want your Googlemail/Gmail received by Thunderbird and scanned then there is another alternative to STunnel. You can use the Thunderbird Webmail extensions to retrieve your GMail for you - with the Thunderbird GMail extension and unchecking one box in the Internet Mail provider of avast you can receive and send GMail and have it scanned by avast as a regular POP account.
Alanrf I use this. Could you please tell me what to uncheck? Thanks
Thanks alanrf, I did as you suggested and sent myself a test email to my gmail account and retrieved it through Thunderbird. I have avast setup to put in the clean messages in inbound and outbound emails. When I received the email it did not contain the message and when I clicked on the avast ball it did not say it was scanned. Do I need to do some other changes? Thanks for your help.
The way the messages are being put together seems to cause problems for avast to insert the “scanned” message.
However, if you look at the message source in Thunderbird (View > Message source) you should see the avast X-Antivirus headers have been inserted showing that the message has been scanned.
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--------------020106010107060103070504
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit