Dear Avast team,
First of all, thanks for creating and maintaining an excellent and free security product!
Several (mostly elderly) family members that still use Windows, have Avast Free edition running for their antivirus and email protection.
Since their automatic upgrade from Avast 4 to Avast 5, they have all experienced a complete failure of their email functionality. I checked, and there are no warning messages at all. Mail reception fails silently: the status bar shows the normal pop/imap server login messages but no email is ever received.
For them, the only way to regain email was to disable the Mail Shield completely. They then started receiving all their back-logged email that was on the POP/IMAP server. This is of course not a good solution.
They did not, by the way, change email clients during the Avast upgrade. Their email worked before, and stopped working after the Avast 5 upgrade. They run a variety of WinXP, Vista and 7 Home Premium on their PC's. For email, they mostly use Thunderbird and Incredimail.
This appears to be a serious regression in Avast 5.
If the Mail Shield functionality changed this fundamentally, it might have been wise to put a warning message onscreen telling them that certain settings had to be changed/verified for Avast 5. I have not yet found a solution that properly solves this issue in a way that I can explain to these elderly family members ;-)
Thanks for your time,
Ed.