What icon is this in my system tray and what does it do?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

http://members.arstechnica.com/x/deffexor/avast.gif

^^^^ What’s this icon in my system tray? (magnified 300% for clarity…)

I deduced that it is clearly part of Avast because when I kill the “ashMaiSv.exe” process, the icon disappears. This leads me to beleive that it is part of the “Internet Mail” provider module. When I hover my mouse over the icon, it displays:

unknown.ord.scnet.net, unknown.ord.scnet.net, unknown.ord.sc…

I’m not familiar with this host/domain.

Right and left-clicking on this icon appears to do nothing. Is it supposed to do something?

2

That’s avast! mail scanner at work it means you email is being scanned…

3

This icon only appears when sending or recieving email and otherwise will not display on the systray. :wink:

4

What if it is always there?

I have mostly POP3 email accounts, but I also have 1 IMAP connection. The icon doesn’t disappear when I close my mail client (Thunderbird).

5

Do you have other application for emails? I mean, a pop notifier, a spam killer?
Are you using MS Outlook to download IMAP accounts?

If you use TCPView (www.sysinternals.com), do not show unconnected endpoints (on Options menu) is there any connection using ashmaisv.exe ?

6

Ah, that might explain it. I use PopFile to do my spam filtering. As soon as I kill Popfile, the Avast Mail Scanner icon disappears.

Thanks for the help!

7

This shouldn’t happen if Popfile stops checking after a timeout… Does it have this feature, a timeout?
Sometimes the pop checker application does not ‘release’ the connection and avast! stays there, running…