Q: I use Zone Alarm firewall and have troubles logging into my web mail service (Yahoo mail, Hotmail etc.)

A:

The inability to login to Yahoo or Hotmail email services commonly results from the privacy settings in Zone Alarm being set too high. You can do one of the following:

1. Add Yahoo Mail (mail.yahoo.com) to your site list in the Privacy area. Make sure at least "Session cookies" and "Persistent cookies" are allowed.

or

2. Turn off Privacy settings (Cookie Control) completely.

Furthermore your browser connections are intercepted by Web Shield proxy module running on localhost. This confuse Zone Alarm and result in incorrect identification of the Web page. Session cookies may be considered as "3^rd party cookies" and blocked. For proper functionality of Privacy control with Web Shield provider do the following:

3. Add "localhost" to your site list in the Privacy area and allow all cookie types (especialy 3^rd party cookies)

Next you must turn on Privacy filtering for the Web Shield module.

To turn on "Privacy filtering" for the Web Shield provider:

4. Open Zone Alarm control panel
5. Choose Program Control
6. Choose the tab "Programs"
7. Find the line with "avast! Web Scanner"
8. Right click on the process name and choose Options
9. Check the: "Enable Privacy for this program" checkbox.

Also consider checking the option “Authenticate program by full path name only” on the same dialog. With this option unchecked for Web Shield you must re-enable Privacy control every time Web Shield process is updated during avast! program update.