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Norton AntiSpam 2004
By Cade
Metz
February 17, 2004
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- Product: Norton AntiSpam 2004
- Direct Price: $39.95 direct
- Company Info: Symantec Corp., www.symantec.com/antispam
Editor Rating:
Three cheers for the new kid on the block, Symantec's Norton
AntiSpam 2004, which is also available as part of Norton
Internet Security 2004. Symantec's first standalone venture
into the antispam market caught a greater percentage of junk
mail than any other standalone utility we tested. It gives
you a fair number of tools for customizing its filters, and
much like the other Norton security products, it's
wonderfully easy to set up and use. The worst you can say
about this product is that it works only with POP3 clients;
IMAP, Exchange, and Hotmail users are out of luck.
You can easily build whitelists and blacklists. You can
create your own filters, telling the app to block messages
containing certain words or phases. And, using a pair of
buttons added to your e-mail client, you can train its
Bayesian engine to recognize what you consider spam. Once up
and running, Norton AntiSpam 2004
blocked 93 percent of the spam streaming into our in-box,
and it incorrectly identified only 3 percent of the
legitimate mail we received.
You can adjust the overall aggressiveness of the app's
engine, but you have only three levels to choose from: low,
medium, and high. During testing, we used the default medium
level. As a bonus, Symantec includes a tool for blocking Web
pop-ups.
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