URLs in emails possibly disabled by Avast?

[stevenhouk]

Could avast possibly be disabling the clickability of certain URLs in emails I am receiving?  I am using Outlook 2007 on Windows Vista Home Edition on a Gateway FX laptop.  As part of my job I received a test version of an email  that's associated with a new function.  The email included several images with a URL associated with each one.  All but one of the images, when clicked on, opened a browser window to their respective sites.  The one that didn't work had an associated URL in a format similar to "http://2.xxxx.me".  When clicked on, there was no response of any kind.  When I noted the full URL address and hand-typed it into a browser window (IE, Chrome, Firefox), the indicated site came up immediately after translating to a new URL.  If I forward the email I received in Outlook to other email accounts I have that I access via Web portals, and then click on the URL from there -- or on the image associated with the URL -- the site comes up immediately.  The only place where clicking on the image / URL doesn't work therefore appears to be via my locally installed copy of Outlook where avast also lives.  A work colleague who also uses Outlook (albeit the 2010 edition) reports that he does not have this problem, although he does not use avast.

Is there some setting in avast that I need to set in order to make this work?  If so, is this because the unusual URL is being trapped as some kind of threat, due to its nonstandard format?  Or possibly is that URL needing some kind of DNS-like processing to take place (which appears to be happening just fine via a browser) that Outlook 2007 does not support?

[bob3160]

Welcome to the forum.
I don't use Outlook but, see if the following will help solve your problem:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310049