Norton AntiSpam 2004

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.


Norton Antispam - the good and the bad   November 10, 2003
27 out of 28 found this review helpful

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


Maybe they shipped it too soon?   October 14, 2003
Jerry Nixon (Conifer, Co United States)
26 out of 27 found this review helpful

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


Norton Antispam 2004 by Symantec   November 10, 2003
19 out of 41 found this review helpful

When I read and bought this item, I thought it was suppost to prevent pop-up from Ads and Block pop-up, but it really did not happen. It still has pop-up ads coming up and not block spam web site. This things does not work at all.


Runs and Works Great for about 1 week   October 7, 2003
T. Eichers (WA United States)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful

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.