All my mail providers, Gmail, GMX, Hotmail, Inbox, work fine in Outlook Express after unchecking the boxes to use SSL in each account. I can even receive Yahoo mail by using FreePops. Avast! takes care of the encryption itself.
On a side note, I highly recommend GMX. It's free, full featured, and best of all, not made by Google. You even get 2gb of free online storage space for any kind of files. It has no ads and does not place anything in your outgoing mail. You can access it as web mail or through clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Windows Mail and maybe others as well.