Avast Infection Notification causes Thunderbird Timeout???

[archalien]

Been using Avast and Thunderbird for a while now, love both.
But they never have played well together completely.

If both running, and Thunderbird gets an email with a suspected virus in it, Avast "An Infection Has been Detected......" warning pops up....GREAT
But if I dont handle the pop-up manually, Avast keeps re-warning me of the infection say every 10 or so minutes or something, building up.  Eventually Thunderbird times out.

If I leave both running over night, in the morning I have to clear 30 or so Virus detection warnings, AND THEN another 30 Thunderbird timeout boxes.
I have tried board search and google with no luck on this specific situation.
What is causing this? is it fixable? and what are my options to fix it?

Thx

[Lisandro]

You can disable the timeouts of avast into the Internet Mail provider settings (they're disabled by default, anyway).
You can change the Heuristic settings of Internet Mail scanner of avast to fill your needs\wishes.

[archalien]

You can disable the timeouts of avast into the Internet Mail provider settings (they're disabled by default, anyway).
You can change the Heuristic settings of Internet Mail scanner of avast to fill your needs\wishes.

Thanks for the advice, could you be more specific?

[alanrf]

Your problem has not been correctly understood and the advice given is not appropriate; it has nothing to do with the timers or heuristics of avast.

As you have understood, when avast detects a problem in an email and gives you a warning alarm it has interrupted the receiving process of your email client.  avast assumes that you will be around to respond to the alarm in a timely fashion.  When you are not, then the timer that is running in Thunderbird (or in another mail client) will expire and the mail client will take the course set for it by its developers when their own timeout occurs.  There are no settings in avast that can affect the timeout activity of your mail client (since, honestly, avast does not have a clue which email client you are using).

The "Advanced" tab of the Internet Mail provider offers you some options here.  You can choose to run in "Silent" mode and provide a default answer.  Please understand carefully the results of a default answer.  You will either allow all potentially infected messages into your mail store or you will tell avast to discard all potentially infected messages.  The former choice may leave you exposed to having your entire mail store quarantined and the latter choice may result in the discarding of emails you may wish to have seen.  Individual emails cannot have a discrete existence (they only have meaning as part of an email service) and they are not placed in a quarantine area so, once discarded, they may well be lost forever.

[archalien]

Thank You Alan!

I understand what you said and realize its implications.
I will try silent mode with automatic deletion and see how I like it.

I think its a shame this problem has not been addressed more thoroughly, while I would still prefer a non silent notification of when and who is hitting me w/ viruses, I have NEVER had a false positive on a known good email, that is to say Avast has caught every thing it thinks it sees and never flagged anything I know to be ok. So silent rejection may work just fine for me.

Again, its a shame this issue has not been worked out better, say giving the alert on a timer, if not manually handled, another default action can be taken prior to mail client timeout.  -- just a suggestion to anyone listening.

[DavidR]

These automated processes are part of the Pro version, the Home and Pro have to have differences (the programmers have to eat) and the interactive function of the Home is a major one. So if it is a big enough of a concern perhaps the Pro version is what you want.

Though what Alan has said would equally apply to the pro version if you sent it to the chest, once sent there it is effectively dead. It couldn't be sent back to any email folder partly because of the way Thunderbird works with its emails and folders, but it shouldn't cause any issues with loosing main storage. So it isn't entirely an issue with how avast handles email detections.

[Lisandro]

I will try silent mode with automatic deletion and see how I like it.

Left click the 'a' blue icon.
It will start On-access protection
Click on Internet Mail and then on Customize.
Go to Advanced tab and select Silent Mode and the default answer No.
This will send the file (email) to Chest.

[alanrf]

I think that I did not make myself clear.

No antivirus product can make the decision for you.  If you want a choice you need to be there to make the decision when the mail is being received by your email program.  avast (and every other antivirus program) has not got the slightest clue which email program you are using - they just know that you have a program that follows the standard ways of how to retrieve and send email - beyond that they do not have any idea how your choice out of the myriad of available email program works, times out, handles email files or communicates with you. 

The email clients were never designed with the thought of being interrupted by a an antivirus program as the Internet Mail provider does (not one single one of them) and there is no way that avast can communicate with the mail program to tell it that it has done so.  To the email clients this generally looks to them as if the email server stopped communicating with them - which is why they run a timeout - to detect the server going away.     

Sending the mail to the chest is just about useless - in fact in some ways worse than useless since it makes folks imagine that something can be done with it.  A mail message outside of its mail server or mail client is just so many wasted bits and is best consigned to the void.  There is nothing you can do with it.  There is not a standard in the world for handling orphaned email messages and every email program handles them differently.

So, if you do not want to be there then you must make a default choice and hope that it is not too bad a choice.