What exactly is Internet Mail Redirect?

[norel]

I've spent the day reading through the PDF User's Guide and it does a pretty good job of explaining most of Avast!'s features, but this one has me stumped. Can anyone tell me what "transparent" scanning is exactly and how I might benefit from it? I only use POP 110 and SMTP 25 and that's what it's on right now. Should I just leave it there?

Appreciate it.

[DavidR]

The transparent simply means that 'you' don't have to manually set-up your email client to use the Internet Mail localhost proxy. Users of older OSes win95/98/ME all would have to manually set this up or for those OSes run the avast email protection wizard whit does it for you.

So If you don't have any of those OSes and your ISP doesn't use SSL (secure encrypted) email on those ports then avast should already be scanning your email.

What is your OS ?
What email program are you using ?
Do you have to use SSL ?
What is your ISP ?

[norel]

Thanks DavidR. I have Vista Home Basic and I use Windows Mail. I have a dial-up connection but I don't know about SSL. Avast! is scanning my email okay so I should be alright. If I understand it, the only reason I would need to "redirect" is if my email didn't use ports 110 and 25, which it seems to be doing.

[DavidR]

OK with Vista and Windows Mail avast should be scanning your email.

To check this you can look at the notification area when email is being scanned there will be a new icon in there, see image.

The avast 'a' icon should also rotate, check the Internet Mail provider and the Last scanned: and Scanned count: fields should be continually updated.

You can also check the emails headers as there should be a couple of entries for the avast scan.

If you don't know about SSL then it is unlikely that you are using it, though if your ISP gave you a setup program to save you having to manually setup the email accounts, then you may not be aware of that (unfortunately I can't tell you where to look I don't use Windows Mail). However, if your email was using SSL connections on the standard ports the sending of emails would fail as currently avast can't handle the SSL connection.

So if there are no errors and any of the above indicators should it being scanned, no problem, dial-up shouldn't be an issue, that is what I use.