Turning Off Windows Anti-Virus Program Options That Block UMBS Email
The UMBS email (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, however, do not allow encrypted connections. This conflict causes errors that prevent email from being sent.
If you set your email 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 email program, the anti-virus program, and the version of the operating system.) To allow email to be sent, you must turn off the on-the-fly email scanning option in the anti-virus program. When you turn off on-the-fly email scanning, your computer is still protected from viruses because the programs' main anti-virus functions continue to scan email messages as they are copied to your computer. Do NOT completely disable or remove your anti-virus software. [][26]
Note: You can download anti-virus software 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 Email 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 Email 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 Email Auto-Protect is not installed and you should not receive errors when you change your UMBS email account to use SSL/TLS encryption.
Clear the Enable Internet Email 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 email 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 UMBS email (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 Email 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.
Last updated June 17, 2011 @ 10:30 am
