Why does the Lavasoft Personal Firewall slow down the sending or receiving of email?

Mail servers (as well as IRC and FTP servers) traditionally try to get your identification when you send e-mail, so they attempt to connect to TCP port 113 on your PC. Lavasoft Personal Firewall blocks this request by default and does not let your computer reply. Most mail servers wait a few seconds for a possible response and only then allow you to send the e-mail.

To eliminate this delay open the Options dialog and select the System tab. Click Rules under Global System and Rawsocket Rules and select Allow inbound identification. This solves the delay problem, however please note that your port 113 will not be in "stealth" mode to any scanning sites. To revert to stealth mode you should allow inbound identifications only to specific remote hosts that you connect to using FTP, SSH, SMTP and Telnet protocols.