Avast causing blank emails in Outlook?

[VanEck]

We have been seeing an issue here with the Avast Outlook plugin causing Outlook to send blank emails.

If we disable the Avast Outlook plugin, everything goes back to normal... but that obviously defeats the purpose of what we bought Avast for.

Anyone ahve any insight on what is causing this and how to fix it? Thanks!

[spi]

yes, i do the uninstall and installed with the new version 6

[VanEck]

Version 6 is not an option for business users yet.

[scythe944]

Could you be more specific about the version of avast and the version of Outlook in question?

I'll assume 4.8 for avast, but what version of Outlook?

BTW, I have used 4.8 with Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010 (currently using) and it works ok but without plugin.

[VanEck]

It seems to mostly be occurring with Outlook 2007.

[oriestora]

 I will definitely recommend this to my friends

[VanEck]

Since we are apparently the only company experiencing this and no one has any advice, we want to just completely disable the Outlook plugin for every client.

Is there a way for us to do this from console?

Everyday there seems to be either someone sending blank emails, or reports of the avast outlook plugin crashing outlook. We want to just turn it off for everyone across the board until this gets patched/updated/whatever.

It is really disrupting our business...

[jx]

Are you able to collect the crash dump of the crashed outlook?

Cheers
jx

[ianh64]

OK. I am not alone. Also found  http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=82305.0 this thread on very same subject.

I reported this about 18 months ago when we were using Avast 4.8 Pro with Outlook 2007 and Exchange Server 2010. I was basically told that Exchange server 2010 was not supported and that I should upgrade to Avast 5, which was not an option as, at the time, no remote console.

I have just upgraded to Avast Business Protection and to my huge surprise, I find the issue is back/not gone away. The temporary work around was to disable the Avast addin in Outlook, but its on a per user basis so I cannot roll out to the rest of the school until I find a permanent fix or better work around.

My work around with Avast 4.8 was to disable scanning of outgoing emails in the console. This was not an issue as it was a greenfield deployment do all machines could be shipped out with outgoing messages disabled, but now they are in the wild, I need an option that is per machine and can be remotely deployed.

I dud have an old support ticket for this which I will see if I can reopen.

This must be a major problem as Business Protection must be aimed at business users who would be very likely to be running Outlook 2007/2010 and Exchange Server 2010.

 

[avadas.de]

Hi,

we also had someone in the German forums a while ago, wo experienced a problem with avast! with the avast! Business Protection Client and mail body removed, when sending mails from Outlook 2003 (latest patches applied): http://forum.avadas.de/threads/3484-Mails-sind-leer

When he configured Plain or Rich Text Format for the mails sent, the e-mail body was not removed. Only when using HTML format. He wanted to contact the product support, but didn't reply to this topic again. For me it seems a general problem in a combination with some settings (just a wild guess), because I read about this issue 1-2 years before around here as well as in our forums. Not only with the APP client.

[ianh64]

After some testing, the problem has been isolated mails sent in HTML format. I have raised a further (to the one that I raised 18 months ago against AVAST 4.8 ) support call and provided avast with a selection of emails, some of which work fine, some of which have the message body stripped. I have received the following communication from avast as below. Hopefully with Business Protection being a business orientated project and Outlook/Exchange falling into the same category, hopefully we will get a resolution, even if it is the ability to run with the Outlook plugin enabled and us not scanning outgoing message (which I could do in 4.8 Pro but seem not to be able to do in BP 6).

- in this particular case, it's a problem with processing TNEF-formatted messages in avast! Mail Shield.
This proprietary email attachment format is used only by Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server. It's also used by Microsoft Outlook to generate a richly formatted view of the message, such as embedded (OLE) documents or Outlook-specific features such as forms, voting buttons, and meeting requests.

It can't be explicitly enabled or disabled (except through the Windows registry), selecting RTF as the format for sending an e-mail implicitly enables TNEF encoding (then it's used in preference to MIME standard).

Under some conditions, the native-mode Microsoft Exchange organizations send entire messages as TNEF encoded raw binary independent of what is advertised by the receiving SMTP server. This method is not RFC compliant (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323483) and can cause some problems when using RFC compliant email clients (such as the infamous blank emails with winmail.dat attachments).

This issue has been escalated to the development team, but we can't offer any solution at this time. Probably the only available workaround is to disable TNEF encoding in Microsoft Outlook as described in Microsoft KB article "How e-mail message formats affect Internet e-mail messages in Outlook" (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290809).

[VanEck]

Thank you for continuing to pursue this issue. After spending months scratching our heads, we have just been opting to disable the Outlook plugin altogether to work around this issue. We'd really like to be able to utilize this feature of Avast, and hope it can get resolved soon. We are still on Avast 4.8.

[dsantimore]

Note that we, too, are having this problem with Avast 6 Pro using Outlook 2007 and Office365 (Exchange 2010 MAPI). Interestingly enough it only occurs on a single computer, but I believe most of our computers have the plugin disabled.

As with Ian's environment, we have discovered it only occurs on HTML emails.

Dan.

[ianh64]

Has anyone got a work around to this yet?

If I deploy with mail scanner turned off, I seem to get Outlook 4.8 plug-in errors that then need to get resolved on a per user basis.

Avoiding html is not an option. This is a school and sending html emails are part of the course.

[Lisandro]

Well, I can't say anything about the version 4.8 and Outlook 2007.
But, for sure, the version 6 and Outlook 2007 are working very well.