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Norton Antispam 2004

Norton Antispam 2004

List Price: $39.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Worst Norton product I've ever owned
Review: As most of the other reviewers have already said, this might be a great product if it worked.

I purchased and installed this product for a client based on the strength of Norton's name and my positive experiences using other Norton products. But using it with Outlook Express produced the same blocked-up email problems that so many other people have noted. I started getting calls from my client daily asking why he wasn't getting his email. The webhost claimed (correctly) that it wasn't anything on their end. Disabling Norton Anti-Spam was the only fix.

Symantec support was responsive but not helpful. They told me how to change the time-out on the affected email accounts, but this didn't help...just took that much longer to get the Outlook Express errors. Support avoided all questions about how to return the product and get a refund, and seemed to indicate that the problem was on our end. Considering that I'm a web designer and have almost two dozen email accounts, I don't think I'm an email novice.

Even if Norton Anti-Spam did work correctly, it seems to hog memory, slowing the whole machine to a crawl. I really can't fathom why a simple email filter has to be so resource-intensive.

After this experience, I'm not convinced that any third-party spam-blocking solution is the answer. Spam-blocking SHOULD be an integral component of your email client, not some afterthought tacked on. I might recommend checking out email clients with built-in spam blocking tools, like Eudora (spam-blocking version costs) or Mozilla Thunderbird (free), though I have yet to experiment with these programs myself yet.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: If it worked, it'd be great. Disappointed.
Review: This has to be the most disappointing Norton product I've bought. Norton Antivirus etc are great - but this product has been a disaster, and I've had to turn it off to make email usable.

Echoing another review on this site, Antispam was good for about a week. Then things started going wrong. Email download became very slow - emails apparently were queueing up to the spam analysis process, and nothing was appearing in the Inbox or the Spam folder. Breaking out of this appears to have meant lose emails.

A couple of weeks later, Outlook started spewing "Not enough memory to display this [message/reminder/window/whatever]" errors. I couldn't even list the email in my Inbox, let alone open them. My RAM is fine - and amazingly enough, as soon as I disabled antispam, the error went. I also spent some time with the wonderful "Outlook crashes when you click the 'This is Spam' button" bug. Quality - although allegedly now fixed.

I've had enough of this product. I'm an experienced Windows user with an MCSE, and my system runs well - with the exception of Antispam. I won't be looking out for Antispam2005, I can tell you. Based on my experience, my advice is "Stay well clear".

[For reference: OfficeXP, WinXP, AthlonXP2000, 512MB RAM]

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Don't buy this if you are running Win XP and Office XP
Review: As noted in many other reviews, there is a bug in Norton AntiSpam that is displayed every time it is launched for each user's profile. Symantec has claimed in the past this is a Microsoft issue but that's not the case. Search the net for "AntiSpam+runtime error" and you'll see for yourself. Also Norton AntiSpam changes the subject and body of many messages to simply blanks spaces so I have to manually delete the e-mails anyway, so what's the point? I'm ready to go back to SpamKiller, this is too buggy for me and I've used it 6 months.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Quit working
Review: DON'T BUY THIS PRODUCT UNTIL THEY FIX IT. I use Outlook Express 6.0 and get hundreds of spam e-mails a day. For the first couple of months Norton's Antispam product worked great. Today, it gets hung up processing messages. As others have described, you have to turn it off in order to complete downloading your mail. This makes the product virtually useless and there is NOTHING on Symantec's support site about the problem. The Mozilla open source Thunderbird e-mail client spam filter is just as good, free, and appears to work better.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Consistently crashes outlook with multiple profiles
Review: Symantec will not even admit that this is a bug but since I installed antispam 2004, it crashes outlook on a consistent basis. Not sure which is more annoying - that this happens or that Symantec know that it's there for the last 6 months & haven't even mentioned it on their support site.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Trouble with Outlook Profiles
Review: I run Windows 2000 Pro with Outlook 2000. Antispam 2004 does not work right when running with multiple Outlook profiles. Symantec doesn't seem to be addressing the issue either. Lot's of folks have raised the issue with them.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: It's great until.....
Review: I've been using this product for the last several months, training it to recognize spam as I go along. Then a couple of weeks ago it stopped working altogether. All spam is getting through (about 50 a day) and pop-up ads are popping up again. There's nothing in the company's knowledge base to explain what happened. They'll allow you to contact them via email only after you go through the knowledge based question & answer support. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to understand my question and asks for more information. I guess phrases like 'doesn't work anymore', 'stopped working', etc. isn't in their vocabulary, but it won't get past the 'need more information' request to give me any contact emails. I'm very frustrated, even though originally I loved this product. Just before it stopped working, I recommended it to family members with PCs, but told them hold up for now. I tried reinstalling it, but that didn't have any effect. I'm really frustrated and don't know what to do! So, get more info on this product before buying it.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: It goes woof, woof.
Review: It does not work with Netscape. Period. It does not stop SPAM. Use your money to light a cigar instead.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Will consistently crash Outlook if using multiple profiles
Review: This has been a known issue almost since the product launched and Symantec is aware of it...although they seem to deny that it's their problem.
If you use multiple profiles in Outlook, Outlook will crash at startup with a Runtime Error message; only disabling/removing AntiSpam will allow you to open Outlook.
See here (http://www.nocrash.com/ncbbs/msgs/3478.shtml) for additional comments from other users.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Lifesaver
Review: I avoided Norton Antispam because of the poor reviews at Amazon. I tried Spamwasher, and a couple others which I have mercifully forgotten. Nothing worked. They required me to read through the spams to see if I wanted to read them! No help at all.

Then I got a new laptop with Norton Antipam 2004 installed. It worked great. Just what I wanted. It put spam, and nothing else, in a separate folder. No "training" or long setup was necessary. I then bought NAS for my desktop computer. It installed easily and works great.

I don't know why this product gets poor reviews here. My experience has been absolutely excellent.


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