Norton_Antispam_2004_review

Being a part of Norton’s Internet Security suite, Norton Antispam makes sense as the spam detection and removal client of choice for current users of the Symantec suite programs. One the other hand, its appeal to newcomers is not quite as certain.

Definitely not without its limitations, the client is neither the most powerful nor the most efficient anti spam utility out there. Norton Antispam is easy to use and more importantly, makes managing spam a lot easier than most of its competition. Other anti spam programs can be difficult to figure out while this one is pretty much user friendly with an appealing interface.

The Norton Antispam 2004 client offers full integration with Microsoft Outlook 2000/XP/2003, Microsoft Outlook Express, Eudora, and is also compatible with most POP3 email programs, including Netscape Messenger and Netscape Mail. Along with being bundled with Norton Internet Security, Norton Antispam is also available in a stand alone format for less than $40.

The filtering capabilities of Norton Antispam are quite impressive, erring a bit on the conservative side by default, to ensure that you will still catch the rare message from a friend or associate that you heard from in a long time. In general, this means you’ll still see a few spam messages arrive in your inbox folder, but the vast majority will be sent to the Norton Antispam folder; a holding folder for retrieving messages before you send them on the waste bin.

Users of this program have a limited selection of configurations settings that are available to them, including a filtering setting that determines the level of spam. These three options range from a low level of filtering that identifies the least amount of spam but also ensures personal email is rarely falsely identified as spam, to a high level that offers maximum filtering for identifying the most spam. The default level is a middle ground between the two that identifies nearly all incoming spam while simultaneously limiting the number of false positives.

In addition to its filtering capabilities, user defined rules can also be added for specifying specific words or key phrases as a way to indicate valid email or spam. While Norton Antispam automatically adds addresses to its allowed and blocked lists depending on how incoming mail is identified as valid or spam, the user can manually add or remove email addresses in the configuration area of the program.

The one major complaint we have with Norton Antispam is the amount of time it takes to process changes in the status of messages from “this is spam” to “this is not spam”. There is a several second lag between initiating the change and having it take effect, a lag during which the user is prevented from doing anything else. If you designate a batch of messages to spam, you will have to wait for each one to be processed before you are able to completely focus on another task.

Nothing is more annoying than waiting for your computer to finish a routine task, and we’re sorry to say this, but the lag is Norton Antispam is quite the routine occurrence. Something else that is annoying with Norton Antispam is that program will occasionally fail to load with the mail client that it connect to. Whenever this happens, an abnormal shutdown of the mail client follows when the user attempts to process spam.

While these annoyances aren’t critical, they’re the small details that set good software apart from great software. Overall, we are quite pleased with its spam filtering capabilities and ease of use, although we would like to see Norton Antispam become more stable and efficient in its processing of email.