Avast certificate problems

A friend has a problem with his free Avast! It upgraded on Friday - I don't know old or new version numbers. Yesterday (Saturday)he was getting all sorts of certificate warnings from Avast. Today his email just isn't working.

His email client is Outlook 2003 running on Windows 7.

Googling the problem shows there to be quite a few reports about this. Perhaps I'm oversimplifying it, or have misunderstood it, but It seems Avast have changed the way they scan emails such that they assume all emails accounts use SSL.

His email account does not use SSL, it's a perfectly normal POP account that's worked for many years. Quite understandably he has absolutely no intention of changing his email account in any way,

It seems that it may be possible to turn off email scanning, if so and this fixes the problem then fine. Else it'll be junking Avast and using another AV.

I'm going over there Monday evening to have a look.

Any experience or knowledge of this Avast problem would be appreciated.

Ooh Outlook 2003. To be honest I can't remember the last time I had email virus scanning enabled. Given it brief tries over the past 10 years and never come across one that worked properly without messing things up. Just disable any sort of interaction with email clients on Avast!. The real-time scanning will catch any virus attachments anyhow.. And if disabling it doesn't fix it, rip off Avast and put security essentials on. I think that about covers you.

Thank you Sir.

Like you I've not used email scanning for many, many years, and I also use MSE as my AV.

I'll have a look this evening and will probably do something along those lines.

His wife's PC is of a similar setup so I'll talk to them about that as well.

Just got back from dealing with it. He'd been unable to get to his emails since Friday. Avast just blocked with a security certificate warning. I disable email scanning in Avast and it all worked. Rebooted a couple of times to double check and it all seems OK now.

I also disabled email scanning on his wife's PC as, although she hasn't seen the problem who knows when it might occur.

Was the certificate error genuine ?

There is/was a windows issue with forcing higher levels of encryption in certificates leading to multiple warnings which users typically just click through.

No it wasn't. And it only started occurring after an Avast update. Clicking through made no difference, Avast completely blocked all emails.

When I disabled email checking 35 emails were downloaded straight away, i.e. all the emails since Avast upgraded itself on Friday evening.

Can't you just deselect the option for SSL certificates in Avast?

Didn't see the option, but found the option to turn off email scanning so went for that. To be honest don't see the point of scanning them anyway, the resident AV real-time scanner would pick them up before they actually did any harm.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

To be honest don't see the point of scanning them anyway, the resident AV real-time scanner would pick them up before they actually did any harm.

Better to keep them out the door rather than rely on not tripping over them once inside. Safe mode execution and transfer to others are possibilities not covered by real-time scan, having seen the HD encryption virus do its thing I would rather it never got onto anything although I don't know if it was known to the database at infection time.

I found it in Settings ¦ Active Protection ¦ Mail Shield ¦ Main Settings ¦ SSL Scanning