racmar wrote:This was posted on the avast! forums:The whole point of scanning email inbound is that it prevents infections from ever making it to your message store. It is far better to prevent it getting into the message store in the first place than detect it once it is there. Once the infection is in the message store there is the risk of it being detected there and the whole message store being quarantined or potential damage to the message store by an effort to excise the infection from the message store by an anti-virus program. These are the points being missed when you are told to just turn off the plugin.
The Outlook plugin is definitely the recommended method of scanning email when using the Outlook program. If the plugin is not used then, depending on the type of email accounts being used, scanning of the mail might still be done using the Internet Mail provider of avast. This scan will work for regular POP/IMAP/SMTP mail accounts in Outlook but will not work for any secured access (using SSL/TLS connections) - this is of course where the great advantage of the plugin exists - it is totally independent from the connection.
The concern about mail remaining marked unread in the Inbox is very understandable. Hopefully the avast team might have some comments on how the plugin could be involved in the observed problem.
I guess I'm just going to live with closing and re-opening outlook whenever my inbox items cannot be marked as "Read". I think it's probably a good idea anyway, and I'm not comfortable /w disabling my users outlook email scanning. I hope someone figures out a good fix for this problem in the future.
p.s. its not just avast...happens with nod32 also. I also found that with EMON in Nod32 enabled there were huge problems trying to send mail, i.e. they wouldn't go.
So the problem doesn't sound like its specific to any anti-virus product....