Cannot send some email

[Richard M]

I am having problems sending emails with file sizes over about 300KB, maybe less as I'm not sure when the problem starts. The blue bar gets 90% across the sending box and then stops. I have no problems with small emails but as soon as there is a large document on it it just refuses to go. If it was just mistyping an address it would go and be bounced back. Does Avast stop emails over a certain size? or is it something else.
I am using 98SE OE6 along with Zone Alarm Spybot and Ad aware.
Thanks in advance

[Lisandro]

Richard, which is the attached file extension?
Do you use the free or the paid version of Zone Alarm?
avast does not stop sending emails by size... it could be a small timeout...
Try to increase both timeouts (of avast into the Advanced tab of Internet Mail provider settings and of your email account, in Properties of the account, Advanced tab too). You can set both to 600, for instance. If you're on a DSL connection (not dial-up) it shouldn't be necessary a so long timeout anyway...

If this does not help, can you uncheck the Outbound mail scanning?

[Richard M]

Thanks for the reply
I am using Zone Alarm free edition. Have increased timeouts to 5 mins on both OE and avast,and also unchecked outbound email scanning. All this and still they won't go.
I have tried with attachments as a word doc and also a zipped one, and also with all the text in the email itself with no attachment. None of these will go
As far as I am aware ZA does not check any outbound emails.
My ISP has said try using a different SMTP but as avast now puts 127.0.0.1 in the smtp box I dont't know where to make this change. All help appreciated. Thanks

[Lisandro]

Did you try to disable the scanning of the Outbound messages?
See the provider smtp tab settings...
Does it help?

[Richard M]

Yes I did disable outbound email scanning.

I tried again later and eventually the email went (only to be bounced back later!!). So now I am reinstating the various settings to see which was causing the problem. I think it was the short time out that was the problem.

Anyway thanks for the help.

[Connection]

Hi there

I was having the same problem with Avast 4.5.  Any messages bigger than around 500k would simply remain in the outbox.  However what was worse is that the recipient would recieve a copy but the message would remain in the outbox.  So a person might recieve 15 1MB emails from me as outlook kept trying to send it!  I changed the settings under advanced on Avast but this didn't help.  I had to change the settings on my Outlook account "More Settings" options (under advanced) where I changed the timeout to 6 minutes.  This has fixed the problem hallelujah! 

Many thanks for the assistance! Keewl!