I shut off ZA's spy program it has but that's the one I don't know if I should turn back on for sure too. I also have win patrol running.
That is wise, my firewall also has an anti-spyware plug-in with that running it scans lots of file on boot and avast is forced to scan those same files, slowing boot times because of this. With other anti-spyware cover you don't need the gimics of the firewall one.
I've shut off mail scanning by both ZA & Avast. They say the mail is just like any other files & we don't need email scanning by antivirus. True or not?
Who are they because you should stop listening to them ? Emails aren't just like other files, multiple emails are often stored in a single file, e.g. Outlook Express uses a database file .dbx any infected email would have to be extracted from that .dbx database file if it wasn't detected/scanned before it was saved there.
The act of extracting an infected email from the .dbx database file could either fail or corrupt the .dbx file rendering it useless and the emails in it that weren't infected also lost to you. It is also very common for some AVs to treat these files as a normal file and delete the whole file and however many emails that are stored within it. So emails are not the same as normal files. ThunderBird in its FAQs warns of ths possibility about AVs deteting this type of email folder/database file with the loss of all emails in that database.
So no you shouldn't disable the avast Internet Mail scanner as it scans email before it is stored, making the above problem less of an issue. Prevention is much better than treatment.
