Email Guardian, Ransomware Protection - becoming a time sink

[Oliver20]

Hi,
I've loved Avast for years but lately I'm finding I'm having to turn off features that should be protecting me.
The first thing I had to disable was Email Guardian.  With it enabled, I am unable to send or receive email from my hosting company.  None of the settings suggest why - but with it enable, I simply cannot connect to the IMAP service using either commercial email clients or my own home grown IMAP applications - they cannot open the TCP socket.
Not ideal, but I have other things for vetting email, so I was ok turning that off.
Over the weekend, I has suddenly found that a plugin I *have* to use for software development (it signs code at the end of the compile) was halting for 150s at the end of each compile.  After spending the best part of the day trying to establish where the problem is, I took a punt on disabling Avast One... and now it all works.
I turned off shields in turn until I found which one was to blame - Ransom Protection...
I like the idea of Ransom protection, but this is affecting a local, trusted, process that has been running without change for years, and the project files are not even listed in the Ransom protection folders.  Still - Avast One has decided to upset a process that is perfectly legal, and doesn't appear to have any way to determine why it's treating this plugin as a false positive for malware.

Avast is great... but if the product continues to do more to get in the way than protect my machine, I'll probably move to something else - which, yes, may be less secure - but I need to be able to use my machine too.

[r@vast]

Hi,

Can you attach screenshots of any error messages you are receiving?

[Oliver20]

Sadly not - there was *no* indication whatsoever that Avast was the cause of either issue.

The Ransomware problem would just cause Visual Studio to halt for 2:30secs on each project build (the proprietary signing plugin runs after each target is built) as though Visual Studio had crashed, but after the timeout, it would carry on as if nothing was wrong.  I enabled diagnostics on the build and the build even reported that it was only taking 00:00:00.49 seconds... which was true for the *build* but not factoring whatever the post-build plugin was up to.

If I disable Avast Ransomware protection, it runs without any halt.  But there's nothing on any screen/log (as far as I can see) that suggests Avast is the culprit - it was pure chance I turned it off.

That was partly based on the email grief.  I have a tool that organises IMAP folders and that stopped connecting to our IMAP host.  I could see the error there because debugger would through an exception when I tried to create a TCP socket.  Again - Avast was up to something, but not telling me.

If there's somewhere that shows what Avast is blocking, I'd love know where to look!

[r@vast]

Can you provide a support file, please? https://support.avast.com/article/submit-support-file/

[Oliver20]

Certainly - File ID: 2HIZG

[thejoecool]

Is Email Guardian causing me to get this message and not be able to send emails out from Mozilla Thunderbird?

"Sending of the message failed.

An error occured while sending mail.  The server responded: [VO-1] Message blocked due to spam content in the message.  Please check the message and try again."

It seems like this started happening after I installed Avast One.

It doesn't matter what the content of any email I'm trying to send is, it blocks it from sending beause it thinks it contains spam, which it doesn't.

Please advise.

Joe - Piedmont, OK