First of all, thanks for creating and maintaining an excellent and free security product!
Several (mostly elderly) family members that still use Windows, have Avast Free edition running for their antivirus and email protection.
Since their automatic upgrade from Avast 4 to Avast 5, they have all experienced a complete failure of their email functionality. I checked, and there are no warning messages at all. Mail reception fails silently: the status bar shows the normal pop/imap server login messages but no email is ever received.
For them, the only way to regain email was to disable the Mail Shield completely. They then started receiving all their back-logged email that was on the POP/IMAP server. This is of course not a good solution.
They did not, by the way, change email clients during the Avast upgrade. Their email worked before, and stopped working after the Avast 5 upgrade. They run a variety of WinXP, Vista and 7 Home Premium on their PC’s. For email, they mostly use Thunderbird and Incredimail.
This appears to be a serious regression in Avast 5.
If the Mail Shield functionality changed this fundamentally, it might have been wise to put a warning message onscreen telling them that certain settings had to be changed/verified for Avast 5. I have not yet found a solution that properly solves this issue in a way that I can explain to these elderly family members
The main issue remains; that Avast SILENTLY breaks all email functionality after the 4 → 5 upgrade.
I have already had some requests to uninstall Avast since “their PC is broken” after an automatic Avast upgrade. I cannot imagine that Avast wishes this kind of publicity, especially for their Freemium product…
It seems like a lot of people are having trouble with the latest version of Avast, the free virus checking software. Suddenly, Avast is blocking access to POP and IMAP email accounts.
If you’re having this problem, here’s the fix:
Open Avast
Click on ‘Settings’ (upper right corner of page)
Click on ‘Troubleshooting’
Click on ‘Redirect Settings’
Clear all the port #'s from each field
Check ‘Ignore Local Communication’
Click ‘OK’
Close Avast
Problem solved!
To enable outgoing mail:
Open avast! user interface
Click ‘Real Time Shields | Mail Shield’
Click ‘Expert Settings’
Click ‘SSL Accounts’
Click ‘Add’
Enter your SMTP server name in the ‘Host Name’ field, select SMTP in the ‘Protocol’ field, enter the port number (25) in the ‘Port’ field and select the encryption.
Click ‘OK’
Close avast! user interface
I would have expected that several months after the release of avast! 5 the upgrade process from 4 would not render my email completely unusable and cause me to waste several hours trying to find a fix. >:(
The link Pondus gave you in his post gave you the information you needed plus more. It could have saved you time of searching, but we are more than happy to answer your questions here if you have more. Thank you.
I did read and apply the information provided by Pondus. It did not solve the problem.
My POP3 accounts do not use encryption but even trying adding them to the SSL Accounts with an encryption method of None did not work.
The only way I found of receiving incoming mail was to clear all the port numbers from the Troubleshooting section as suggested in the warrior forum post.
The only way I found of enabling outgoing mail was to add my SMTP server to the SSL Accounts depsite the fact that it does not use encryption.
Although it took me a couple of hours to find the fix, I am glad I did. Avast! has saved my bacon on many an occassion and I did not want to run without the email shield and did not want to change antivirus program. I would however have expected that something which worked properly under avast! 4 would not break when automatically upgraded to 5.
Some SSL Email servers use their own internal antivirus and therefore Avast will not scan them. However if you do not use such an email server, please read the first link I put in this post on how to configure your settings to allow for Avast scanning of mail. If this does not answer your question, then look at the second link. Thank you.
