AVG security alerts triggered by incoming spam mail attachments from deleted Thunderbird email accounts
Some time ago (.1 year) I deleted a number of email accounts from Thunderbird ending @southcreake.org, eg treasurer@, lectures@. As best as I can tell, these accounts are no longer set up on Thunderbird but AVG is regularly alerting me to security threats triggered by attachments to incoming mail on these old accounts.
I attach a typical screen grab.
It would seem that somewhere ghost versions of these accounts still exist on my PC but I am at a loss to know what to do in order to finally delete them.
Any suggestions?
Nigel
Chosen solution
What a stupid message. It tells you in minute detail a load of useless stuff, but not where it found the file.
BTW there is no such thing as a attached file in a thunderbird store. All attachment files are stored inline in a mime encoded format (that is plain text) and are completely inert as text. For there to even be a risk, you would need to open the email, which would show you had an attachment, then you would have to try and do something with the attachment as it is not decoded from MIME until you try and save or open it. This is one of the reasons I removed AVG. What are they doing, opening text files, decoding the text to original binary file types and then trying to do something like write it to memory or disk just so they can scan it to see if it might be a hazard. All I see that as doing is playing with fire for no reason.
if you go to the troubleshooting entry on the help menu you will find a show profile folder button about half way down your screen. Clicking that will open the appropriate profile folder. Open the mail folder and have a look at what is there as this is the store for POP mail.
If you have never compacted (File menu) I suggest you do so now. AVG might be trolling through 10 year old entries in your current inbox that are hidden because they have been marked deleted but not purged from the store by a compact action. Deleting marks the item deleted, it also generally copies it to the deleted/trash folder. But it leaves the original data in the file until a compact clears it out. It just does not display that data.
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My attachment hasn't loaded. Don't know why. Tried both png and jpg formats. Alert states incoming mail heading and email address, eg treasurer@southcreake.org followed by a file name for the attachment.
Attachments on initial posts have issues. Try on a reply and it should be good.,
I dumped AVG about 15 years ago because it was unwieldy and unable to get the message I wanted it to do things different from the defaults without raising alerts all the time because it was not happy that I was happy.
When you remove an account from Thunderbird the emails and folders for the account remain in the profile folder. Unless you choose to removed data as well when removing the account.
My guess is the AVG brain dead scanner is looking through these dormant files and slowing your system just in case you might access them. Interesting product that is is trawling the entire folder tree looking for mail from defunct accounts to scan. You can probably delete these folders, once you are sure they contain nothing you want. But to be honest I would like to see that image before pontificating too much. I might be on the wrong tack entirely.
Hi Matt
Makes total sense - I will dig into the profile folder but I think you have got in one.
I now attach the screen grab but I'm not sure it will tell you much more than you have already deduced.
Many thanks.
Nigel
Chosen Solution
What a stupid message. It tells you in minute detail a load of useless stuff, but not where it found the file.
BTW there is no such thing as a attached file in a thunderbird store. All attachment files are stored inline in a mime encoded format (that is plain text) and are completely inert as text. For there to even be a risk, you would need to open the email, which would show you had an attachment, then you would have to try and do something with the attachment as it is not decoded from MIME until you try and save or open it. This is one of the reasons I removed AVG. What are they doing, opening text files, decoding the text to original binary file types and then trying to do something like write it to memory or disk just so they can scan it to see if it might be a hazard. All I see that as doing is playing with fire for no reason.
if you go to the troubleshooting entry on the help menu you will find a show profile folder button about half way down your screen. Clicking that will open the appropriate profile folder. Open the mail folder and have a look at what is there as this is the store for POP mail.
If you have never compacted (File menu) I suggest you do so now. AVG might be trolling through 10 year old entries in your current inbox that are hidden because they have been marked deleted but not purged from the store by a compact action. Deleting marks the item deleted, it also generally copies it to the deleted/trash folder. But it leaves the original data in the file until a compact clears it out. It just does not display that data.