My paranoia is aimed at the practice of Avast!emailing files that were infected for inspection. What if they are my banking files? With credit card information. Love letters. Hate letters. Customer files. Invoices. And so on.
But to transfer random data if they get infected? I don't think so. No matter how weird you may think this is. It is my data.
I do not think that your concern for the security of your data is weird, what does surprise me is that you believe this is how avast works and that you imagine the developers of the product would be so foolish as to implement it this way.
avast simply does
not email your private data. The settings of avast allow you to specify SMTP parameters
if you wish to do so. Those SMTP settings are used:
1) to notify you at the email address you specify that a virus has been detected
2) if you open "the Chest" to which infected files have been quarantined
and only if you deliberately choose to do so you may send an infected file to avast in which case the SMTP parameters are used to send the email.
For me - I simply leave the SMTP section empty. If I need to communicate with the avast team on these issues they are active in this forum and there are a lot of very knowledgeable fellow users here who can advise me if there are concerns I have about the product and the way it works.
If you choose to continue using avast I hope that you will find this forum useful - and share with us valuable tips you may happen upon as you use avast.