Norton AntiSpam 2004 By Cade Metz February 17, 2004

• Product: Norton AntiSpam 2004
• Direct Price: $39.95 direct
• Company Info: Symantec Corp., www.symantec.com/antispam

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.