ChoiceMail works generally well with AVG security software, but occasionally we receive reports from our customers complaining that mail downloading is somewhat "spotty" when they use AVG Personal Email Scanner (Outlook plugin version of AVG does not have this problem).

AVG posted an article about how to change some settings so that their software works better with ChoiceMail.

To read this article please follow this link.

As with any anti-virus product - please remember that ChoiceMail allows it to scan mail after the mail has been downloaded as a file regardless of your email scanning settings. This means that if the mail is scanned before it gets into ChoiceMail - it will be scanned again after it has been downloaded by ChoiceMail and saved to a file. This, of course, unless you excluded ChoiceMail folders from being scanned which is a common practice if your anti-virus email scanner works well.

A number of customers have reported that mail sometimes gets stuck and cannot be downloaded properly. We have also heard that outgoing mail gets stuck or is sometimes very slow.

We have discovered that a common cause of this problem is due to a program called McVSEscn.exe that is part of McAfee's VirusScan version 8.

For more information, please see

here

(A cached version is available here)

As far as we know, the only current solution is to disable that program. Please be aware this conflict is NOT an explicit conflict with ChoiceMail One. It is happening with various email clients.

April 17th, 2004
We have been informed that McAfee has both acknowledged this issue and have published a fix for it. We have not tested this fix ourselves and we have heard from some customers that it does NOT in fact fix the problem. If you wish to try their solution, visit their site and download their fix.

Sceneraio: When you run ChoiceMail, you see the error message

"This program has been damaged, possibly a bad sector of the hard drive or a virus. Please reinstall it"

We believe that this problem is caused by a rather nasty virus that needs to be removed to fix the problem. This virus causes problems with many programs, it is not unique to ChoiceMail.

Apparently, this virus also tries to detect various anti-virus tools and prevents them from working.

If ChoiceMail One crashes when you start it up or close, or you have been using ChoiceMail One without any problems for some time but have suddenly encountered any of the following symtoms, it is very likely that the problem is due to certain kinds of spyware programs running on your machine:

Symtoms:

* Your sender lists disappear
* ChoiceMail One doesn't close properly
* ChoiceMail One generates access violations
* The error message "Could not write to ChoiceMail.ini" is displayed in one of the activity logs
* Complaints about not being able to write to other INI files show up in the activity logs

In particular, we have determined that a recent update to a program called TGCMD.EXE is preventing ChoiceMail One from saving critical data and is directly responsible for these problems. That program may also be preventing other applications from running properly. A detailed explanation of this program can be found
here and is well worth reading.

According to our research, a number of companies including Sony, HP, and Comcast, install this software by default on your machine and the general consensus is that it should be removed. We have verified that once tgcmd is removed, ChoiceMail One will begin operating normally, although you may not be able to recover your existing senders if they were corrupted due to TGCMD.

Symptom: your email program stops receiving mail or receives mail only intermittently. You may also be no longer able to send mail out.

Users that use Norton AV 2001 or older, Kapersky AV or some other application that uses or redirects port 110 and/or port 25 could see the message that port 110 and/or port 25 is already taken by some other application. This problem has also been reported by users of AVG, Panda, BitDefender, Avast and NOD32.

Port 110 is the default port used by email programs to RECEIVE mail.
Port 25 is the default port used by email programs to SEND mail.

Alternatively, you may see error messages in your email application indicating that a connection could not be made to the mail server. For example: in Outlook Express you might see a message.

There was a problem logging onto your mail server. Your User Name was rejected. Account: 'Your account name', Server: 'localhost', Protocol: POP3, Server Response: '-ERR unknown user name or bad password', Port: 110, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 0x800CCC90, Error Number: 0x800CCC91"

You may also see access violations triggered by this problem.

A third symptom is that email can only be received or sent intermittently or not at all.

This may also happen after ChoiceMail has been working flawlessly for some time, purely due to a change in some other module on your computer.

ChoiceMail cannot always detect and handle this problem automatically. The problem is not caused by or due to ChoiceMail itself. It is happening because the port redirection is not being handled properly by the other application. We have also seen this problem when an otherwise perfectly working AV product was updated such that this bug is introduced.

The solution to change the POP3 port number and the SMTP port number in ChoiceMail to values other than 110 and 25 respectively or to shut down the other application. These are the ports on which ChoiceMail listens for your email program. The settings can be found in Options | Configuration | Advanced.

You can use any port numbers you wish, the catch being that you can't pick ports that might conflict with something ELSE running on your computer. We have found that using 111 and 26 typically work fine but you can just keep incrementing those values if you continue to find conflicts.

If you change the POP3 and/or SMTP port settings in ChoiceMail, you must also change the port settings for the account in your email application that connects to ChoiceMail so that they match.

There are other articles in our knowledgebase that can help you with specific email programs. Please use our knowledgebase search facility with the appropriate keywords for your situation.

We had a report recently where ChoiceMail stopped working after BitDefender was installed, even though all the ports were configured properly and so on.

The answer below is from one of our customers:

"I checked my ZoneAlarm settings and found that I had denied something called vsserv.exe permission to act as a server. I don't give anything permission to act as a server unless I know exactly what it is. Turned out to be in the BitDefender directory, so I OK'd it, and that solved the problem. Now if ZoneAlarm had said "BitDefender is trying to act as a server", I would have not had the problem. I'm sure Choice Mail identifies itself when trying to access the net."

Thanks to Frank for this one.

Problem: Your ChoiceMail and Trend Micro Internet Security (or other related programs from the same company PC-Cillin) anti-virus claims that ChoiceMailAdminControlPanel.exe file is infected a "Generic Trojan Virus"

This is obviously a false positive which is a bug in the Trend Micro software and not a ChoiceMail problem.

Fix: As of August 22nd 2008 Trend Micro has fixed the problem.

To resolve the problem - please update your Trend Micro Software completely. If your ChoiceMailAdminControlPanel.exe file was damaged by Trend Micro Security software in the process - please reinstall ChoiceMail to get the file back. Do NOT uninstall ChoiceMAil - simply reinstall it so that only the missing file is replaced.

We would like to reiterate that at any point in time there was no virus in any of the ChoiceMail executable files - this was a bug in your Trend Micro security software.

(As always - as mail is being downloaded by ChoiceMail - your anti-virus may report viruses in some messages. This is normal and will not damage your ChoiceMail. Your security software is doing a good job in this instance.)

Problem: Your Symantec (Norton) anti-virus claims that ChoiceMail has a W32.spybot.worm in the ChoiceMailAdminControlPanel.exe.

This is a false positive which was a bug in the Symantac software and not a ChoiceMail problem.

Fix: As of August 6th 2008 Symantec has fixed the problem in their software. To get rid of the false positive all you have to do is update your Symantec anti-virus to the latest version.

To get the ChoiceMailAdminControlPanel.exe back all you will have to do is reinstall choicemail over the existing copy and you will get the panel back without loosing your settings.

We would like to reiterate that at any point in time ther ewas no virus in any of hte ChoiceMail executable files - this was a bug in your Symantec Security Software.

(As always - as mail is being downloaded by ChoiceMail - your anti-virus may report viruses in some messages. This is normal and will not damage your ChoiceMail. Your security software is doing a good job in this instance.)

Problem: Your Avast anti-virus claims that choicemail has a Trojan Horse virus in it.

This is a false positive which is a bug in the Avast software and not a choicemail problem.

Fix: As of July 21st 2008 Avast has fixed the problem in their software. So to get rid of the false positive all you have to do is update your Avast anti-virus to the version VPS update 080721-0 or later.

If your choicemail was damaged by Avast the only way to restore it is reinstall choicemail. Please do not uninstall ChoiceMail as that will remove your settings. Simply install ChoiceMail over the existing choicemail folder and everything will go back to normal - your settings will be preserved.

We would like to reiterate that at any point in time ther ewas no virus in any of hte ChoiceMail executable files - this was a bug in your AVAST security software.

(As always - as mail is being downloaded by ChoiceMail - your anti-virus may report viruses in some messages. This is normal and will not damage your ChoiceMail. Your security software is doing a good job in this instance.)

If you are using an anti-virus program that supports email protection, it is critical that you leave it running with email protection enabled while you are installing and configuring ChoiceMail.

This is necessary so that ChoiceMail can detect this situation and configure itself appropriately so that there are no connection conflicts.

If you disable your anti-virus product, and install ChoiceMail, ChoiceMail will install fine but it will not be able to detect the existence of your anti-virus product. When you subsequently reenable your anti-virus product, ChoiceMail may immediately fail and you will have to take steps to perform a manual configuration to get ChoiceMail working again.

 
We have heard a few reports where ChoiceMail One just doesn't work properly if you have Norton AntiSpam installed. One symtom we hear quite often is that your email client doesn't detect that a message has in fact been sent out properly even though it was in fact sent out.

We don't know what Norton's product is doing but we have confirmed that uninstalling Norton AntiSpam solves the problem completely.

Symtom: while retrieving mail from ChoiceMail, your email client pops up an error message indicating that the server is not responding.

Solution: This problem appears to be caused by bugs in some firewalls. We (and others) have seen this happen with Norton Internet Security. According to comments on the web (via a google search), the solution is simply to not use Norton Internet Security and instead switch to another firewall product such as ZoneAlarm that does not have this problem.

ChoiceMail One behaves as a server with respect to your email application. Therefore ChoiceMail One opens several ports as part of its normal operation. However, these ports only need to be accessible to your email client which is typically running on the same machine.

In fact, although those ports show up as open, ChoiceMail is designed so that by default, it will only accept connections from the machine that is actually running ChoiceMail. In other words, you cannot actually connect to your PC through ports 25 or 110 from other machines unless you explicitly enable remote access from within ChoiceMail. Even if you do so, you can still control what remote machines are allowed to connect to ChoiceMail. More importantly, it is still not possible to use ChoiceMail's SMTP port (25) as an open relay as it requires authentication.

If you are still concerned, and you want to prevent these ports from being seen by machines on the network, you have several options. Indeed, we highly recommend these options independently of whether you are using ChoiceMail One.

1) In general (and independently of ChoiceMail One), if you have a broadband connection, you should have a hardware firewall between your modem and your computer. A hardware firewall will block external access to these open ports by default. A number of companies make excellent hardware firewalls at very competitive prices - do a websearch to find one you like.

2) Whether you have a broadband or dialup connection, consider strongly installing a software firewall. A software firewall not only blocks you from external visibility but it also detects rogue programs on your machine that are trying to connect/send information without your knowledge.

Most software firewalls will let you configure your system so that ports 25 and 110 are open to local applications but will make them inaccessible for external connections.

A small number of customers have reported difficulties getting ChoiceMail One to work with McAfee's firewall, particularly after converting from the trial version of ChoiceMail One or after upgrading to a newer version of ChoiceMail One.

However, we have found conflicts with McAfee that we don't find with other firewalls. We have found that even though this firewall claims to be allowing ChoiceMail One to operate, ChoiceMail One is still being blocked.

Where customers with the McAfee firewall contacted us about having problems with ChoiceMail One, we found that ChoiceMail One worked as it should with McAfee temporarily uninstalled from their systems. Therefore, if you wish to continue using the McAfee firewall, please contact McAfee for assistance in getting it configured properly so as to allow ChoiceMail One to work properly. We reiterate that this is NOT a problem with (or a bug in) ChoiceMail One.

Regrettably customers who are unable to (or don't wish to) resolve the problem with McAfee's firewall and ChoiceMail One must make a choice between the two products. Naturally we prefer you choose ChoiceMail One. We know that ChoiceMail One works fine with other firewalls. If your choice is to use ChoiceMail One, you can find help at the following URL to guide you through uninstalling the McAfee firewall.