OT-ish Anyone had trouble recently with Avast screwing with usenet access ?

No problems w/ Avast so far.. using Windoze Mail for newsgroups.

Mark Z.

As I understand it (which may not be much), Avast prefers that one connects to the standard (non-SSL ports) for POP3, SMTP, and NNTP. Avast intercepts the traffic, scans it, and then (if available) handles the traffic via a secure SSL/TLS link to the provider. It appears to handle the configuration pretty much automagically but you can check what ports it's using in the Mail Shield | Expert Settings | SSL Accounts tab.

If XNews uses a non-standard NNTPS port (i.e., not 563) or it has recently changed its SSL/TLS settings then maybe your Avast has gotten confused. You should be able to manually set the port to use, or to remove the SSL setting entirely, from the referenced tab.

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Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA

Not internet related as such, but I found yesterday that Avast prevents some of the newer Popcap games from running. I have no problem with email or n/gs so far running in conjunction with Avast.

Ron

Firstly, if you are using the same isp as you email address, their news server (or their implementation of it) is known to be flakey on occasion so it may just be them and the Avast thing is a coincidence...

Avast used to complain about my ssl connections to Gmail and Eternal September but since update 6.0.1367 it's been quite happy about them.

A couple of nights back, my Xnews stopped working - sort of. I'd just installed some Windoze updates. Nothing special, just the weekly security crap, so I immediately suspected that. I removed the updates, but still had a problem. Usenet access via Thunderbird seemed to still be ok, as did Windows Live Mail. What was happening was that a selected group's headers would download, and load up ok in the program. You could pick any message anywhere in the list of headers, and from anywhere within a thread, and the message body would download, and display correctly. But when you then tried to select any further messages, although the new message body appeared to download - as in you could see a normal-looking burst of activity on the modem lights - when the new message was then displayed, it was in fact the first one again. And so for any message selected. All that was ever displayed was the very first message selected.

I found this odd, as Xnews is basically a stand-alone dot exe. It does not have to be 'installed' as such, so no real system hooks. Never-the-less, I removed it, and reinstated it from a backup copy that I keep on an external drive. Exactly the same. I then discovered that in fact Thunderbird and Live Mail were also having similar problems with access to messages, but nothing like as consistently as Xnews. Some messages would download and display correctly, but others would lock you into this 'same message over and over' behaviour again.

So having sat back and thought about the problem, I came to the conclusion that about the only thing between Xnews and the news server itself, was the virus checker. It is Avast that I use, and it has never caused me a problem in all the time I have been using it since it first came out. I have not authorised any updates to the core program recently, so I was reluctant to believe that this could be the problem. Never-the-less, when I did a bulk disable of all the shields that it had running, the problem went away. Reinstating them one by one, it came down to the Mail Defender shield that was causing the problem. So for the moment, when I use Xnews, I am just invoking the "switch off shields for 1 hour" option in Avast.

So anyone else had any problems ? Any of the computah deep-understanders on here, got any idea what exactly Avast is doing to cause this behaviour, or what has started it ?

Arfa

So Gareth, Were you saying something ??

YES Arfa, That is exactly the problem I'm having with one of my computers, (this one) I have two computers and each is having a different problem with Thunderbird and newsgroups. I have a post started to Mozilla forum regarding my other problem, after I finish it, I'll start a second post about our shared problem. Mikek

Try to telnet to the server, substituting whatever ports and addresses are set in Xnews. See if you can manually pull messages by ID and their relatives, doing actions side by side with the same post/thread in Xnews.

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Adrian C

So do you have Avast installed ? Have you tried temporarily disabling it to see if it cures the problem ? Be interested to see what other info you collect from your forum activities.

Arfa

You are getting close to exceeding my computah expertise level there, Adrian, but I will try to give it a go ...

Arfa

I do use both their mail and news servers by default, and yes, I have in the past had some 'issues', often a weekends, and usually associated with server maintenance, upgrading, or migration. I have a friend who works for them, and I can usually find out if anything has gone on when there's been a problem.

However, in this case, it does not appear to be server / ISP related. I did suspect that it might be, so I Googled for another free-access news server, and put that into Xnews. It behaved exactly the same.

Thanks to all so far for the useful and interesting insights.

Arfa

Yes I do have Avast installed. I have had Avast installed for a long time. I haven't updated for a long time. so I'm doubtful that Avast is the problem. ( I did update just this morning, but it didn't help my problem) I have not tried temporarily disabling it. No response to the forum question. Kind off a busy forum, but no help in an hour :-) You might add your post.

Mikek

Since it works with the mail shield disabled it's probably Avast then, guess that whatever they did which fixed it for me, broke it for you :(

Not a solution, but you can tell Avast to stop redirecting/scanning nttp port 119. Of course that means it won't scan newsgroup posts, but at least you shouldn't then have to turn off the email scanning.

(Avast ->settings/troubleshooting/redirect settings/mail and change the port number in the nttp box or leave it blank.)

Err,,, I have exactly the same problem. I'm on Windows 7, and using Windows Live Mail to read usenet, and have Avast.

To be honest, I thought this "many posters just repeating the original post" was a running gag until I checked this thread on Google Groups, to find it wasn't at all how my newsreader displays it.

(Hence my feeble attempt here to join in with the running gag that never was).

I thought it was quite a good gag, actually!

Gareth.

Interesting, 3 people having the problem, all 3 are using avast. Coincidence or causality, inquiring minds want to know. As far as a gag, it's starting make me mad! Still no response on the forum. Mikek

Xnews on my PC has been playing up for a few days (I don't use Avast).

It started with both sliders at the RHS so it only downloaded a couple of headers, when I moved the start slider to the LHS it took most of the day only to fail woth out of memory error.

At each try I halved the start slider until it completed getting headers and displayed ready - the latest article was dated December.

Then I double checked the finish slider was hard to the RHS and set the start slider just a smidge to its left, with group/findI was then able to search the most recent file in my downloads folder and resume tagging from there on.

Late last year there were problems with one or more virus spammers uploading

*HUGE* numbers of rar files all the same size - Xnews couldn't handle that many headers!

OK, I just opened Avast went to 'Real Time Shields' and stopped the "Mail Shield" our shared problem went away. We need a better solution, but as of now it is Avast. Mikek

Thanks Lee. Done that. Got a result. Everything now switched back on in Avast, and no probs with Xnews :-)

Arfa

Hmmm. Oddly enough, I've been having that as well with my Xnews. I just assumed that it was all part and parcel of the original problem, until I discovered the Avast connection. I just went and tried a couple of groups, and same thing, except sliders as far apart as they can go. This is a pretty quick computer, and the 'net connection is 20 meg so it will download all those headers in a relatively short space of time, but of course, they go back a long way, and although the headers are there, the message bodies seem not to be, and you get the "message not found - shall I search Google" message. Thing is, I've never quite figured in Xnews, what exactly invokes the window with the sliders in, when you enter a group. You seem to get it on some, but not on others. And then ones that you do get it on, will suddenly stop showing it, and will only download 'new' article headers for weeks, before suddenly starting to show it again. Has that been your experience as well ? I wish I knew where the setting was to stop it coming up so that only new headers were loaded, and why it seems to reset itself from time to time. Anyone know ? If you really want to download all the headers, you can always invoke that window manually with the "Refresh Headers Special" setting in the "Groups" drop down.

Arfa