Customer Reviews

Norton AntiSpam 2004

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(46)

 

 

I am a sophisticated user with 20 years of PC experience and a very clean and well maintained PC. When I encountered an error with Norton AntiSpam 2004 and Outlook XP I was quite rigorous about verifying the problem. I uninstalled and re-installed the software. I tried various configurations. In all, I spent more than six hours trying to resolve the error; I came to the determination that the error was a bug in Norton AntiSpam.

I documented my findings in meticulous detail and submitted the report to Symantec. I can honestly say that I have never encountered more pathetic technical support than Symantec. I submitted three separate reports, and each reply was a canned response with cut-and-paste solutions (literally, I could see the '>' characters showing that they were simply forwarding me solutions from other cases) that had nothing to do with the error I was reporting. Not only were they not helping to track down the bug, they were not even reading my reports (in one reply, they said this was a known problem with Outlook Express ... when I had clearly communicated that the problem was with Outlook XP). Furthermore, there is no mechanism for escalating the problem report. And phone support is $30 a pop.

I ordered Norton AntiSpam 2004 before the earlier reviews, all of which report bugs and troubles, were posted on Amazon. Hopefully my review and the others will save you the troubles of this buggy product, and save you from the awful Symantec tech support.

This product has me in a quandary. On the one hand it provides the simplest, and probably the best, integration with existing email programs. It also does a fine job of filtering. Unfortunately, this is at the penalty of system overhead. Be prepared for quite some slow down in internet access for both Web browsing and email sending. It seems that even if you switch off the options for Add and pop-up blocking, the functions are still operating. Since installing, both my Email, Web browsing has slowed by around 50%. The documentation is also very poor making it difficult to understand what is really implemented and modified within your system. Symantec would do better to restrict the functionality to Email spam blocking and forget, or allow proper configuration, of the additional features

I needed a spam solution.

I had Outlook rules that helped a lot, but I was sick of the spam. That's why I got AntiSpam 2004. But AntiSpam 2004 is not a spam solution, at least not a good one.

It must be meant for people who get like 1 or 2 spam emails a week - and who don't mind manually deleting them, to boot.

The more spam I get the slower and the slower and the slower and the slower and the slower it runs. Adding emails to the spam list is painfully slow and I had to turn back on my Outlook rules because it missed so much spam.

I would guess that AntiSpam 2004 catches 70% of the spam I get.

It does not crash my machine, as some others have accounted, but it regularly is running at nearly 90% utilization making other programs run slowly, too. The more spam I get the slower and slower it seems to get.

I am afraid of what it will be like given another month - I have only been running it one month.

I was very disappointed, and when I wrote their tech support - no answer, unless I was interested in paying for the support. That's the problem with large companys who hide their contact info. I figured I had already paid too much.

Just in case you were wondering if my machine is junk, I am running on a 2Ghz w/1GB RAM. So, no excuse - shame on you Norton.

One final problem, and what motivated me to write their tech support (again, to no avail) is that the proxy that AntiSpam 2004 seems to employ makes Microsoft Front Page and Microsoft InterDev and Microsoft Visual Studio.NET no longer authenticate successfully. I have to disable AntiSpam (and reboot) before I can use either of those tools.

Problems problems problems, and the outlook is bleak.

Two words for you Symantec: Quality Assurance.

Two other words, also: Customer Service

Works great if you can get it to run more that 1 week. After about a week the tool bar disappears from Outlook 2002, and the install program does not allow you to reinstall for repair, you have to uninstall - reboot - then reinstall again. Serves me right for buying a rev 1.0 of a program. I have reloaded this program about 5 times. Nothing about this problem on Symantec's site, and I am not going to pay 30 bucks phone support on a program I already paid 40 bucks for.

Installed NAS, no problems, then rebooted. Invoked Eudora 5.1. Got the message "NAS has detected that COM automation is turned off, would you like to enable COM automation?" I click yes, then close Eudora as directed and reinvoke - same problem. When I look in Eudora's configurations, COM automation IS turned on.

Went to Symmatec's web site and did a search for the problem. There is an entry in their automated system about this and they basically say its a known problem with no solution at this time. They claim the problem occurs when you do not use the default folder for storing your mail files - I use the default.

Bottom line - Symmantec acknowledges a problem with Eudora that has not solution. I do have a pretty yellow box sitting on my desk - AntiSpam my eye!! It's completely useless.

I installed this product on a new PC running XP and Outlook Express 6.0. The product works great except for the 'This is spam' and 'This is not spam'functions. When ever I use them, Express crashes with no error and I have to reboot the machine to get it back up. The (I use this term very loosely) support web site acknowledges the problem but says it only happens occasionally. On my system, it happens every time. They have no solution for the problem. I also do not think I should have to pay for support that will cost me as much as the software did itself. I think the testing department blew it on this one. Oh well, that is what I get for buying version 1.0. I would suggest that others wait for version 1.1 or 2.0, especially if they are using Outlook Express.

I installed the software, and after the first reboot (like another person here) I started to have errors where it would no longer download my email from the POP3 server. If I disable the AntiSpam software and reboot, it works again! ALSO, it broke my Norton AntiVirus software, which still doesn't work! Norton not working with Norton - go figure! Do not buy this, at least wait for another version so they can figure out their issues!

As I indicated in an earlier review, this is head and shoulders above any other anti-spam program I have encountered; however, there is one little glitch that is irritating, and this is how I handle it:

First, I am running Outlook Express for my e-mail, This may be the only e-mail program so affected, I don't know, but every 3 or 4 days, someone sends me an e-mail that stops the system, and won't let any following e-mails through. The first couple of times, I called up my server, and they told me that it was either a corrupted e-mail or one that was too long, and they removed it. Presto, the other messages, which had been held up at the server, came through. It's like clearing a blockage in your plumbing.

Then, I started to think. Next time it happened, I closed Outlook Express and then I disabled Norton Antispam and brought up Outlook Express again, and everything, including spam of course, came through. Then, I enabled Norton Antispam again, and deleted the spam by hand.
Note: save your breath! Enabling Norton Antispam during transmission of a block of e-mails doesn't work. The entire block still comes through, including spam.

It was Norton that was stopping the corrupted e-mail and stopping the system!

It IS a bummer to have to delete 100 or more spam e-mails, but you can highlight a group of them and delete, just be careful not to delete the ones you want to keep, that would normally get through.

As long as your e-mail is blocked, the system (at least mine) will keep sending you duplicates of the messages in front of the blockage every few minutes.

It is still the best system around for killing spam, but this is an irritating glitch. Maybe they'll fix it, in time.

Maybe the best answer is to begin executing spammers and the idiots who are making viruses and worms, etc., and give us back our internet.

I run Norton's firewall and anti-virus, as well as an ad-blocker. I wish it wasn't necessary, but it is. Between them they catch several viruses a week attempting to break in, and almost all spam, so obviously it's a necessary precaution.

P.S. I have finally had to deep-six Norton's Antispam, 2004. The reason? The corrupted messages, if that's what was causing the disruption, were happening daily. Each day, I had to disable Norton's Antispam in order to get my e-mail, and the flood gates opened, letting all the spam, through. So, what's the use? My server has a program which stops spam before it gets to me, and it's free. Some still gets through, but not much. So I have uninstalled Norton's program.

Norton really needs to fix this glitch.

Joseph (Joe) Pierre

author of Handguns and Freedom...their care and maintenance
and other books

I can't even believe Symantec would ship this in the condition it is in. Further, if it is so important to them to have some kind of antispam software in their suite, I can't believe they haven't put lots of resources into fixing it via their live update feature.

Summary of the problems:
It doesn't work... It's not catching spam.

When you select a spam e-mail that it missed and tell it "this is spam" to train it, it is horribly slow... It just took an hour to process the 300 spams I received over the weekend.. This is on a 2.2 GHz machine, and task manager shows that CPU is the bottleneck... 100% CPU utilization for about an hour.

It is not correctly integrated with Outlook. Whenever it processes a message, it triggers Outlook to think it is a virus accessing your address list. The best you can do is to tell Outlook to let it have access for 10 minutes at a time. In other words, if you get more than about 30 spam messages, you actually have to wait around and do a three step process every 10 minutes to get it to keep processing!
NOTE: SpamBully and other products do not do this, so this is NOT an Outlook problem. It is a problem with the way that Norton Antispam talks to Outlook.

In short, a horribly flawed product that should not be shipping until these issues are fixed.

My experience of this product is nowhere near as bad as some seem to be.

I actually ordered an upgrade to NIS and got anti-spam as part of the suite. So far it's been pretty effective at catching spam. I'd like more control over it's operation than a simple on-off switch so that - for example - I could choose the order Norton's filter was applied in relation to my own Outlook XP filters. Instead I've got into the habit of quickly visually scanning the filtered spam then running my Outlook filters manually. This combination pretty rapidly cuts down between 70-100 spams a day to between 3 and 7 that need deleted manually. That's not bad.

Personally I think the secret is a good white list and Norton picks up your email address book just fine - assuming you're using a supported e-mail program. You just need to remember to reimport the address book when you update it.

I can't speak to the problems others have had, but I'm not very forgiving of bad software so I would rant if I felt it deserved it but it just doesn't. That said, from my own experience I do know some of Symantec's products are nasty if you don't follow the installation instructions to the letter (like uninstalling Antivirus before installing Internet Security).

I probably wouldn't have bought this product on it's own but I'm not disappointed I've got it in Internet Security.