Very slow email login

Something I’ve noticed of late (could be since 4.6, although I’m not positive) is that my email client (Thunderbird) is taking a long time to log into my mail server. It usually takes about 15 seconds to negotiate a connection; however, once connected it downloads and scans incoming email very quickly. Before 4.6 connections would negotiate instantly and, indeed, if I turn off the internet mail scanner, connections are negotiated instantly once again.

So it seems that the internet mail scanner is holding up the negotiation process with my mail server for some mysterious reason. What’s odd is that negotiating with my ISP’s mail server (I use my ISP mail as a secondary address) is very quick, but not instant; so this would indicate some sort of server incompatibility with my main mail server, perhaps? I should reiterate: with mail scanner turned off, connecting to my mailserver is instant; and in earlier versions of Avast, connecting to my mailserver was also instant.

What could be causing this? My computer is an Athlon 64 3200+ /w 1Gb RAM, so I doubt it’s a computing power issue.

Many thanks

Charles

The mail scanner performs reverse lookup of the mail server IP address to be able to display DNS name. It can cause the delay that you encountered. You can disable this feature by inserting this line to file avast4.ini under [MailScanner]:
TranslateAddress=0

Excellent - that did the trick. I don’t see what major benefit reverse DNS lookup brings, so perhaps it should be disabled by default? Or is there a good reason it is enabled?