Outlook and Anti-Virus

Do you ever experience the following problems:

Mail is lost or not delivered

Errors when sending and/or receiving mail

Mail being duplicated, either in your inbox or you send the same email repeatedly to your recipients 

HTML code being visible in a message

Fonts showing 10 times larger
(font size 110 instead of 11)

Mail stuck in the Outbox

Poor send/receive performance

Inability to send large attachments

Other issues

Disable the integration between Outlook and your anti-virus software. It will NOT compromise your security since your real-time virus scanner uses the same definitions as your Outlook anti-virus component. The extra integration of your anti-virus with Outlook is not needed and will often cause interference. In other words, you gain no extra protection from integrating your anti-virus software with Outlook.

Additionally, Outlook does not allow you to double-click certain attachments that could contain a virus and this is by design. In case you have another attachment that does have a virus within it, the real-time scanner would prevent you from opening it.

Disabling your anti-virus integration with Outlook is not always easy and depends on what anti-virus solution you're using. You may be able to disable it within Outlook by unchecking it in your Add Ins. You may be able to disable it from the anti-virus console. You may be able to turn off the anti-virus email scanning service. Or you may have to uninstall and reinstall, omitting the portion that integrates with Outlook. In some cases, in addition to uninstalling you may have to download a utility from the anti-virus vendor to complete the uninstall before you can reinstall the software.

In this case, it is best to have a look to see what might be your best solution but when in doubt you can ask. Many anti-virus vendors have forums online where you can ask questions and post problems, they also have a comprehensive knowledge base, you can read the documentation provided by your vendor, you can use Google to search for information, or you can ask someone you know, or even ask here!

As a last resort, if your anti-virus will not allow you to disable its integration with Outlook, you can always use Microsoft Security Essentials as a FREE alternative.