Mayayana wrote:

"FredW" wrote

| If this signature is the only reason for you to discard an otherwise
| good product, you have no idea of the real world and all kind of spam
| that is present in almost all software.
|

I've never seen any software that does that, and
I've set up friends with Avast in the past. I don't
use AV myself.

Adding a custom signature to email software is a
very intrusive thing to do. I'd be very surprised if I
found that some kind of software had done that, and
it's very unlikely I'd keep that software. It's intruding
on personal settings and altering personal
correspondence.

There are other problems with corrupting messages with signatures that
are appended after the client sends a message. For example, if you
digitally sign your messages (performed within your client), modifying
the message afterward means the hash won't match, the message has been
corrupted, and the recipient will get a warning that the message cannot
be trusted because the signature on creation doesn't match the signature
on delivery. The same if you encrypt your messages. If someone sends
you a digitally signed message so you can get their public key and then
reply to them using their key to encrypt your message, anything that
modifies the message body results in a corrupted message and likely can
no longer be decrypted by the sender with their private key.

There is supposed to be only one signature block within a message.
Appending another sigblock, like with Avast, violates the de facto
standard of delineation of just one sigblock. However, Avast doesn't
append a valid sigblock because they don't use a valid signature
delimiter line. So they are sliding their spam into the body of the
message and NOT as a true signature hence they are spamifying the
sender's message. While Gmail and other providers interrogate the
content of your e-mails, even if do to their own spam scanning, they
don't modify the message during transport. Avast is extremely rude and
corruptive to message fidelity.

I use Avast, I didn't bother installing their superfluous Mail Shield
module, but that doesn't mean that I condone Avast in spamifying the
messages of their customers. I also have to use silent mode to avoid
them using their AV as a spam platform. Periodically Avast will decide
to start another marketing campaign and use the adware platform inside
their free products to shove popups at their customers. Silent mode
gets rid of their spam turds; however, it also means all other alerts
are hidden, like when Avast blocks connecting to a hazardous web site or
blocks a download. The action gets blocked but the user won't know why
the site failed to behave because they don't get the popups from Avast
in its silent mode use to get rid of its spam popups.

I tried other free AVs because I grew weary of Avast's spam and their
rude behaviors. I tried Bitdefender free but it was slower than Avast.
That is, responsiveness of my computer slowed with Bitdefender. I've
seen this on more than one host. I tried Avira but its web scanner (Web
Protection in their add-on toolbar) was spyware. No point in going from
adware (that I can disable) to spyware that tracks my web surfing. Plus
I ran into a problem with Avira: if I used a tool that polled the SMART
data from the drives, Avira would begin its own device poll at one
minute intervals. I only caught this on one host that still had a 3.5"
floppy drive when I notice it was groaning at 1-minute intervals after I
queried the SMART data on my HDDs. Avira said they could not reproduce
the problem but I could on every host that I had plus other users were
reporting the same 1-minute queries on their devices.

I ended back up at Avast while disabling its spam sigs along with their
spam popups. Yes, if I paid for Avast then the spam popups go away but
I am NOT rewarding them for their rude message pseudo-sig spam enabled
by default or for employing their freeware as a spam platform.