Web shield stopping outgoing emails

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi,

I’ve been running the same setup for months but last Friday all of a sudden all outgoing emails stopped working. After a ton of diagnosis, I finally figured out that what was causing the issue is the Web Shield in avast (note: NOT the mail shield). What’s strange is that the Web Shield only scans http traffic…

I’m running Outlook 2003 and avast 6.0.1289.

I have had to disable the web shield in order to get things working again, but would appreciate avast tech support’s feedback on how I can re-enable the web shield and still have Outlook send emails.

2

If your email happened to be Hotmail, etc. then Outlook would be using Delta sync to import the web mail and probably uses an http port.

Try this:
Web Shield, Expert Settings, check the ‘Scan traffic from well-known browser processes’ option, see image, click to expand.

3

That did it, thanks!!

Could you explain this a little more though? I’m an analyst and it drives me nuts when I don’t understand what was causing an issue:)

4

You’re welcome.

There are other applications which connect to the internet using the http protocol, which aren’t browsers. This option only monitors browsers and even further well-known ones, none of the more exotic or less well-known/used browsers.

Effectively this has the web shield operate as it did in the past.