Mail Scanner Irratic

[Lyla]

I going to state the blindingly obvious but have you unchecked the inbound scan in the Internet Mail, Customise, POP3 ?
yes, I have all the email protocol boxes checked

I'm at a loss as to why is scans outbound and not inbound if it can scan one it should be able to scan the other on less there is something about the email you receive.

Personally I would not use the 'Insert note into clean message' (if that is what you mean by the mail scan tag) with Incredimail, there have been lots of posts in the forums about Incredimail and the clean note problem for some if just doesn't work and can cause malformed text layout in incredimail because avast inserts a clean note in the text and html parts of incredimail. For some reason that is something that can confuse incredimail's layout. Though this should have no impact in the not scanning inbound email.

Is this a proper POP3 email account or a webmail account that you import into incredimail ?
This is a normal POP3 account and nothing imported from webmail

Has avast ever scanned inbound email ?
Yes, it has scanned before.  Seems like when I manually stop the incoming mail and restart it again, that's when it doesn't show up.  This is when I have to go to the repair function and restart.

What email port do you use in the incredimail email account settings for POP3 server ?
My port settings are the normal ones / POP3 server 110, SMTP 25

I have use my OE email account settings as an example, there should be a corresponding one in incredimail.

[DavidR]

Your answers leave me even more puzzled as there is nothing that is an obvious deal breaker.

When they aren't being scanned I presume that the emails are getting through OK or is email blocked ?

Because of your concern about not having your email scanned you could take some proactive action.
How many email accounts do you have ?

If only one You could try the free version of MailWasher (I use the Pro paid version for multiple email acounts), it is primarily an anti-spam program and it downloads a very small part of your email for analysis and filtering of spam. It displays this small part in text mode and doesn't download any attachments, so it if fairly safe (I exclude mailwasher.exe from avast email scans).

Any email that you think it suspicious, you just flag it for deletion, once you have done that and click process mail, it deletes the email from the email server and calls your email program and you only download what is left, your genuine emails. I love this program as I too am a dial-up user so I don't have to download 'all' email to filter spam or suspect emails. This also means avast only has to scan the remainder (assuming we get it to work).

Something that might help,though I'm not entirely sure as if it isn't scanning effectively it wouldn't be loging, but won't hurt.

It might prove useful to create (for a while) a more detailed avast! log of your mail connections.

You can get the mailscanner to log your connections by editing the avast4.ini file (in  Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\DATA folder).

In the section headed:
[MailScanner]
add the line:

Log=20
and save the updated file.

Then read in some mail to generate the logging information.
The log will be in Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\DATA\log\ashmaisv.log
Before posting the log you should mask any personally identifiable information.

[alanrf]

The old memory cells are sparking intermittently on this one. 

I think I recall before going through the way some of the messages are handled in Incredimail and noting that the message format makes it just about impossible for avast to insert the "clean mail" messages.  However, as I recall, those messages should still contain the X-Antivirus headers denoting that they had been scanned by avast. 

There can be times when avast cannot even insert the X-Antivirus headers (and I have had to work with some developers to make that possible). 

I confess though that this old email professional has a somewhat prejudiced view of Incredimail and I have yet to be persuaded to give this piece of software houseroom on my system to test it.  I have unfortunate experiences of the efforts to remove this thing from the systems of those I support who have (in my view) been unwise enough to install it (the last only a couple of months ago).

[DavidR]

Yes an oldie but not so goodie, insertion of clean notes in incredimail was fraught with problems, it just can't seem to correctly format the email with the text element (or part) of the email also being shown as they effectively get two clean notes one for the html part and one for the text element.

Other email programs seem to be able to cope with the insertion of the clean notes in mime html/text email, but many incredimail users have reported problems.

Unfortunately this problem with clean notes I doubt has any bearing on this non-scanning of inbound port 110 email.

My views of Incredimail are I suspect the same as yours I don't need fancy emails with emoticons, etc. just a functional email client.

@ Lyla
Do you still have Outlook Express or another email program like Thunderbird, that you can test to see if this problem is common for all inbound email ?