Norton Internet Security 2003 By Larry J. Seltzer February 25, 2003

• Product: Norton Internet Security 2003
• Direct Price: $69.95 direct
• Company Info: Symantec Corp., www.symantec.com

Editor Rating:

Norton Internet Security 2003 recently won our Editors' Choice as a personal firewall, and NIS has always included top-notch virus protection. At this point, however, even in the nascent antispam market, it's hardly ready to take on your e-mail, much less the competition. Norton Spam Alert, Symantec's first try at giving NIS such a feature, is overly simplistic, although it's reassuringly conservative and simple to operate.

On our tests, Spam Alert generated one of the lowest instances of false spam identification (only 2.8 percent of legitimate e-mail was identified as spam) but was terrible at identifying actual spam. A whopping 47 percent of spam slipped through unnoticed, a leap of nearly 17 percent over the next-worst, MailWasher. If you already own NIS, you might as well try the antispam feature, but you won't be much better off than with Outlook's built-in filters.

Spam Alert looks only at the content of messages, finding and weighing the presence of spam-oriented words. It doesn't look at the headers, even though many smoking spam guns lie therein. Perhaps future versions will venture further and identify more spam—or Symantec will decide to buy a better antispam solution from another company.

Messages are processed in the POP3 stream. When a message is identified as spam, Norton inserts an identifier into the subject line (the default is "Spam Alert:"). You can then create a rule in your mail program to move or delete flagged messages. You can also add special strings for Spam Alert to look for in identifying what is and isn't spam. Unfortunately, while this ability is useful, it appears to be the only way to create a whitelist or blacklist—a clunky solution at best. The main coarse control, a low/medium/high slider that controls the aggressiveness of identification, is best left on the default (medium). New users may like the simplicity of this approach, but many users will wish for finer control.

Symantec claims support for any POP3 mail client; it does not support Web-based e-mail or Exchange. As with Norton AntiVirus, Symantec updates Spam Alert through the LiveUpdate feature.

If you need the other features in Norton Internet Security, the decision to use its spam filtering is easier. But you can also shut it off and use another spam filter.