Norton Anti-Spam 2004/a review

It's part of the Norton Internet Security 2004 offering, but as a stand-alone product, you can't beat this spammer's nightmare....

BY TIM BULLARD

I built my own barebones computer with an Antec shell, a mid-tower, a 2.8 Pentium 4 chip and an Asus P4S800 mother board plus an 80GB hard drive.

When it came time to protect it, in my mind that point was right after I installed Microsoft XP Professional, I drove to Sam's Club and took advantage of Norton Internet Security 2004.

The reason I decided to go with a suite of protection instead of purchasing individual programs by Norton and paying individual annual fees was not because of the fees. Of course my decision to take advantage of the rebate for Internet Security 2004 was an enticement.

But as a journalist, the component I was most interested in, besides the firewall and anti-virus elements, was the new Anti-Spam addition.

Time after time I've been inundated by spam from mortgage brokers, to male enhancement products to porn, however the porn junk mail has been seriously diminished. I attribute that decline in porn e-mails to my Hotmail account's increased anti-spam elements.

Now that I'm using Outlook with Office 2003, its anti-spam elements are really tight.

Norton Anti-Spam 2004 was unveiled officially on Sept. 8, 2003 by Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) in Cupertino , Calif.

Already even politicians were feeling the brunt of taxpayers and enraged citizens who are fed up with the zillions of junk mail delivered by the hour, clogging up bandwidth and making life unbearable and rife with viruses.

“An intuitive user interface, automatic setup and updating, and effective ad-blocking technology will ensure that users are protected right out of the box from unwanted e-mail and invasive online ads,” Symantec reported in its news release.

Pop-up ads – what a nuisance. Even when you take an online poll on CNN, the results are sometimes blocked with new technology, but with tweaks, you can make sure you download only what you want until spammers are put out of business and the corporate world defines what spamming really is.

As a journalist, I send out identical e-mail queries to publishers and editors of magazines and newspapers to try to sell an article with photography, and as a freelance writer, making sure they receive my e-mail is essential to operating a business.

Sometimes blocking e-mail sent en masse can hurt those who are not sending millions of sales ads and messages but only trying to reach a select few for a legitimate business purpose, not to harass or bombard.

I had been using the advice of TechTV and using several different ad-blockers like Ad-Aware and Spybot. You were told that it took several programs to completely block all spammers and pop-up ads, but infiltration could not be effectively controlled unless you took time out to manually download all new definitions every few days and running the separate programs.

Getting to the reason I use Norton over McAfee as a journalist, the name recognition helps. I first used McAfee as an anti-virus tool. Something about the Norton guy in the clinical suit was appealing, and when I looked at how Norton Utilities straightened out problems on computers, I learned that Norton had something I needed.

Then a virus hit me under the shield of McAfee, and I turned.

“Spam already accounts for the bulk of e-mail messages many people receive today, and it continues to proliferate,” said Steve Cullen, senior vice president of Consumer and Client Product Delivery at Symantec.

According to a news release sent out by Heather Haas, public relations specialist at Symantec in Santa Monica , Calif. , the program uses standard POP3 connections and marks spam when it hits your in-box. With my Internet Security, I mark spam with the icon in my Outlook in-box which is fun to watch it as it reports the spam and contains it. I delete it as soon as I read it.

Sometimes e-mail you need is sent to the spam or junk mail box in Outlook, but if you mark it as trusted, your e-mail programs will remember your preference. Usually the ones sent there end up being office warehouse weekly ads.

This integration with Outlook and Outlook Express along with Eudora keeps this spam folder as a kind of prison for spammers.

“Norton Anti-Spam 2004 will even filter spam from Hotmail and MSN Mail when messages are retrieved through Microsoft Outlook,” the news release reported. My intuition is that I am receiving a whole lot less spam than I was a year ago when my in-box was filled with junk I had acquired from signing up for programs instead of using my alternative e-mail as a catch-all for junk mail.

Maybe you like banner ads. I don't. It's not because of the waste of time. It's not because of the intrusion. It's not even because it's distracting because eye candy is what makes faster hard drives, hypersonic 64-bit chips and DDR memory shine.

I'm always the first one to the store to get the new version of Norton Anti-Virus, but now that I've bought into Internet Security, I think I'm going to stick with it, not only because of the increased security of Anti-Spam.

Norton is not confused by false positives, and it claims its multiple filtering layers catch everything. You have an allowed list. The configuration wizard helps you import an address book into the allowed list. Make sure you don't cut off all AOL senders accidentally.

Just feeling secure isn't enough for me. I'm working on a manuscript. Have you ever lost a hard drive? Not only is it expensive and a royal pain in the butt, it's loss of valuable photographs you will never retrieve. You can only blame yourself, and you have to know when to stop and realize hackers and virus writers have culpability.

Use your Live Update for AntiSpam 2004, and businesses should take advantage of the license offerings for offices.

Spending $39.95 on AntiSpam is worth the investment, plus you may find a rebate depending on where you purchase it at. Never throw your receipt away. Make a copy of it, and keep your box because you need the code bar and proof of purchase stamp.

Symantec operates in 36 countries and sells itself to me as a journalist on name recognition and reputation.

The company was founded in April 1982 and was an IPO June 23, 1989. It has more than 4,000 employees and reported 632.2 million in fiscal revenue in 1999, $828.6 million in 2000, $944.2 million in 2001, $1,071.4 million in 2002 and $1,407 million in 2003.

I had used Zone Alarm for a while until I purchased Internet Security 2004, and sometimes I miss some aspects of Zone Alarm, but I've totally ignored some of the same capabilities in Norton Firewall because I've been too lazy or alarmed to look. I like knowing the IP address of my would-be attacker.

It's amazing to me how Norton's experts start tracking down solutions after a new intrusion or virus hit the market, almost like a manhunt I went on in Boone, N.C. once when an escaped prisoner shot a deputy, blinding him, and fleeing into the hills near the Tennessee border for a three-day chase. At night we'd know we were being watched, and after the manhunt, I interviewed one escapee, and he said he could see us. It must be the hunt that attracts virus trackers to the chase.

I've always noticed that when there is a threat, Norton is always one of the companies that has a first response already publicized before others or at least admits it is still working on a solution.

Symantec has centers for response and research in Utah , California , Tokyo , Japan , Dublin , Ireland , Calgary , Canada and Sydney , Australia . There are development facilities in Waltham , Mass. , Beaverton , Ore. , Alexandria , Va. , Falls Church , Va. , Newport News , Va. , Auckland , New Zealand and other locations.

When I get home from my job, I'll open turn on my LED light on switch, and the blue and red lights will flicker as my Centron 3200 1GB of memory fires up, and my Motorola SB 4200 sparks up a broadband connection and nothing begins until Norton Internet Security protects my system, and I check my e-mail.

Always report your incidents. It helps response times.

One product that I have kept updating over time is WinFax, acquired from Delrina in November 1995, the year I got fired as a reporter at the Florence Morning News and learned how to fax on my IBM, using WinFax Lite. Faxing is still my favorite computer activity, and I'm still amazed at how technology can allow a piece of paper to be transported via Star Trek to another location.

On the Board of Directors are folks from Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, the chief financial officer of Google, the chairman of the board of Bethlehem Steel and other esteemed execs. It totally crushes the antics of those conspiracy theorists who have always contended that anti-virus researchers invent viruses to keep themselves in business.

With the steep spaghetti Western-style rewards being offered by Bill Gates and Microsoft against intruders and virus creators, the need for stealth is still necessary but not as inherently Alpha and Omega until security systems can be totally protected in the future.

The trick to thwarting some unwanted spam is to make sure your e-mail does not totally open up in a pane until you want it to; Outlook lets you download pics from the HTML e-mail separately.

Activation over the Internet makes sure there is no Johnny Depp Keith Richard pirate who is going to steal your code.

Filtering includes checking your out-going e-mail to find out what is and isn't spam.

“It is estimated that 32 percent of the 7.3 billion e-mail messages sent today is spam,” Symantec reports.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission Spam forum in 2003 showed that in 2001 the FTC had 10,000 messages a day on the average, and there was more than 47,000 daily in 2002. In 2003 it claimed to be fielding more than 130,000 a day.

There's about 66 percent using deception, according to the FTC Spam Study in 2003 from a study of 1,000 random messages.

Your wife doesn't want your Social Security number on the Internet, much less your ATM card or other sensitive personal data and passwords.

InsightExpress produced a study for Symantec showing 30 percent of respondents “deal with spam by asking to be removed from the spammer's list.”

No, no. Oh my goodness. This can lead to a multiplication of your spam.

Confirming your e-mail does nothing but pass your address to others through spammers. Spam was made illegal in October 2002 by the European Union, but it does not outlaw spam coming from outside Europe .

In June 2003 there were no American laws against spam, yet some states are becoming savvy.

Malicious codes transmitting your information? Cut it off with Norton AntiSpam.

You can use it on Netscape Mail, Pegasus Mail and Eudora. Spam rules are set on the entire e-mail, the field, the To: Recipient field, the subject line and the body text.

Did you know that broadband use at home skyrocketed 49 percent year over year? This year, 2004, broadband users are expected to outnumber narrowband users.

You can always turn on your Microsoft XP Home and XP Professional firewall, but if you use Internet Security, you're covered. I checked my system with several online programs, including Norton's tool which checks ports. It's a relief to see all those green check marks to show I was safe.

The sad fact is that even a few of my friends think they are safe since they have anti-virus programs on broadband. The National Cyber Security Alliance showed that most broadband users lack basic protections with a constant connection. I even bought an APC backup battery surge control unit, and I feel really safe from lightning and power surges.

Watch your cookie control. If you don't want any intrusion, cut off third-party use, even if it means you can't visit your favorite Red Hat Club site.

Beat the worms. Snub the Trojan horses. Turn on that instant messenger appliance to scan every single file coming into your system.

If your sister doesn't use a firewall and spam killer, don't trust e-mail from your sister.

With Norton Internet Security 2004 I love the Privacy Control and Intrusion Detection. I haven't had to use Parent Control yet, but it's nice to have.