Anti-Virus Programs on Windows Blocking E-mail
The basic e-mail (mail.utexas.edu) server supports the use of SSL/TLS encryption for POP, IMAP and SMTP connections. Using SSL/TLS encryption makes your user name and password unreadable as it travels from your computer to the mail server. Most anti-virus programs (including Symantec products), however, do not allow encrypted connections. This conflict causes errors that prevent e-mail from being sent.
If you set your e-mail program to use SSL/TLS encryption and you receive an error message like:
- "Server does not support SSL"
- "TLS not available due to temporary reason"
- "Unable to establish a SSL connection with the server"
or some combination of these, there may be a conflict with your anti-virus program. (The exact wording of the error message may vary depending on the e-mail program, the anti-virus program, and the version of the operating system.) To allow e-mail to be sent, you must turn off the on-the-fly e-mail scanning option in the anti-virus program. When you turn off on-the-fly e-mail scanning, your computer is still protected from viruses because the programs' main anti-virus functions continue to scan e-mail messages as they are copied to your computer. Do NOT completely disable or remove your anti-virus software.
NOTE: You can download Symantec Anti-virus from BevoWare and re-install it on your computer to have the correct settings, or you can follow the procedure below.
To turn off the Internet E-mail Auto-Protect option in Symantec Anti-Virus:
- Open the Symantec Anti-Virus program from the Windows Start menu (or double-click the icon in the Taskbar).
- From the Configure menu, select Internet E-Mail Auto-Protect. You can also select it from the menu tree in the left-hand pane.
NOTE: If you do not see this option, then Internet E-Mail Auto-Protect is not installed and you should not receive errors when you change your basic e-mail account to use SSL/TLS encryption.
- Clear the Enable Internet E-Mail Auto-Protect option. This disables all the options for that setting.
- Click OK.
- Do not skip the remaining steps! From the Configure menu, select the File System Auto-Protect option.
- Make sure that the Enable Auto-Protect is still selected. This ensures that your that your anti-virus program is fully functional.
- Exit the program.
More Information
On the Windows operating system, Symantec Anti-Virus (included in BevoWare) and other anti-virus programs can be configured to scan incoming and outgoing e-mail on-the-fly. Specifically, they look at the POP and SMTP connections between your mail program and your mail server. Anti-virus programs can't scan encrypted user credentials when a message is sent out, however, so they intervene to prevent encryption from being used on POP and SMTP connections. This behavior can cause problems for basic e-mail (mail.utexas.edu) users once they turn on SSL/TLS encryption. To get around this problem, you must turn off the on-the-fly scanning. Disabling the Internet E-mail Auto-Protect option in Symantec (or on-the-fly scanning in another anti-virus program) will not compromise the security of your computer as long as the File System Auto-Protect scanning remains active. Remember to schedule your anti-virus program to check for updates daily, and schedule a full scan of your system at least once a week.
