I had to reinstall Avast and I do not have it configured the same as before because There is an extra icon in the tray. When I mouse over it says something about Mail. I cannot access this icon, either left click or right click. Then after several minutes it goes away.
When I installed Avast there was something that asked me if I wanted to merge the “information icon” with the “main icon”. I said YES and this extra icon disappeared. Now it shows up once in a while as described above.
I never had this happen with my previous installation.
Is it this one?
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=19794.0;topicseen
It appears to be the one, but it was so small I cannot be sure. It has the same general appearance. But as I said, the tooltip said something about mail.
For the 'i' icon (VRDB): http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=14356.msg121337#msg121337
It says that they are merged now. Yet that icon was present separately for a while.
I rebooted and it seems to be OK now. If it happens again I will gather more details now that I know what to look for.
Right click the ‘a’ blue icon (and Details to expand the options).
Choose Internet Mail provider (or Outlook plugin if you use it) and the buttom Customize.
Go to Advanced tab and uncheck the option…
Yes, it’s ok. It’s shown while VRDB is being generated…
When the mail icon was in the systray were you processing your email at the time?
If that icon shows up and you were not processing your email then it could indicate that your system has been taken over as a spam-bot. If that is the case, turning off the icon will not make the problem go way.
I, as Alan did would advise against this (masking of potential symptoms), it doesn’t use any resources and is only present whilst avast is scanning email and there is no need to access it. If you ever see that email icon whilst you aren’t sending or receiving email it could provide an early warning that you have an undetected email spam bot, but it is your system to do with as you see fit.
I now realize why it showed up seemingly at random. I am running MailWasher in the background every 15 minutes. It fetches mail headers and sorts them according to Bayesian rules into friendly and blacklisted.
The icon is a nuisance and I prefer not to have it popping up and down all the time. I had it turned off in the previous installation and I still managed to be warned when mail had suspect content. I do not need to be advised from the tray.
Now that is turned off I am no longer pestered all the time.
The easier option is to stop scanning mailwasher content as I do rather than switch off something that can provide early warning of an undetected spam bot trojan.
Edit the C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\avast4.ini file using a text editor add the line IgnoreProcess=MailWasher.exe to the [MailScanner] section and save the file. I feel there is little risk in doing this as what small part of the email that is used for analysis is viewed in text mode, nothing can be executed. If you already have an IgnoreProcess line then separate multiple values with a comma, e.g IgnoreProcess=ProcessOne.exe, MailWasher.exe
I will give that a try. But not having implemented the mail icon before I am not familiar with what it does. Can you give me some simple examples. Thanks.
The mail icon just shows that the avast Internet Mail provider is scanning emails, either sent or received. So if you aren’t sending or receiving (or in the previous case using mailwasher), then you should be suspicious as something (not you) is sending emails.
The location I gave is the default avast location, if you changed that you would have to compensate for the different location to find avast4.ini, which it looks like you have. You shouldn’t have to reboot for it to take effect, but you could have used the same GUI to re-enable the mail icon.
Have you added the MailWasher.exe file to the IgnoreProcess line ?