How good is Avast Home's email scanner?

[cheater87]

Does it scan as you open it? I have it set to high.

[oldman]

It scans as the mail is downloaded or uploaded. On open, the standard shield should scan it.

[cheater87]

Thank you. Does this include Hotmail, Google and other email services?

[oldman]

Mail scanning only works with a email client, such as outlook express. For web based mail, web shield and standard shield should scan them.

[cheater87]

Should I have it at normal or high?

[oldman]

I've got e mail scanner set to high with no problems. High vs normal just means avast will look for more things. The help file will give more details on what will be scannes for.

[DavidR]

Should I have it at normal or high?

I would say High is my preferred option as it also provides a useful addition to detecting scanned infected files, it can detect if multiple identical emails are sent in a period of time. This could give you an early indication you have an undetected trojan sending out spam on your system.

[cheater87]

What about standard, web and network shields? Normal or high?

[oldman]

Web-normal
standard-high
no net shield since I'm on win98 se

These are the setting I use, with no problems. Others prefer all normal. Try these and see hoe it works for you.

[Bluesman]

Others prefer all normal.

Yeah, I am one of these, all normal here in the settings.

[DavidR]

The slider in some providers has no effect it is there more for consistency, it makes no difference in Network Shield, Instant Messaging and the P2P Shield as they are single purpose tasks with no change in settings though changing scanning sensitivity.

Normal (the default) provides a good compromise between performance and protection. I have Web Shield and Internet Mail on High, the remainder are on Normal.