Norton AntiSpam 2004

For the first three weeks it operated effortlessly, only missing a few Spams (and I was getting 150 Spams a day) and not mis-identifying correct emails. Then suddenly it all started to go wrong. At first, when I tried to tell it a message was Spam, Outlook Express would hang in mid air, and I would have to restart OE.

This wasn't too bad, I could cope with it as it only happened occasionally.

But then it got worse. It couldn't cope with some very simple spam and would refuse to analyse it, while there was a backlog of emails behind it. The only solution to this is to turn off the AntiSpam, CTRL ALT DELETE your way out of Outlook Express (4 times) and then restart OE while hovering over the 'stop' button in order to stop it downloading the whole of the backlog before restarting Norton Antivirus. Of course, sometimes there would be more than one of the spams that it couldn't deal with and you would have to do the whole process all over again. When this happens several times over 4 email accounts, it becomes exasperating.

In the end I decided to try another antispam program as this product was becoming increasingly difficult to live with. Its a shame because I have experienced no problems with any other Norton programs.

I believe from internet searches that it is not just me experiencing these problems.

When you receive email it is checked first by Antispam which examines the header information against its builtin spam filter rules. These are updated regularly via Norton's LiveUpdate and 12 months of updates are included with the product.

Norton AntiSpam will work with any POP3-compliant email program by adding a “spam” tag in the Subject field. It is then up to you to confirm your email client on how to handle the "spam" tag. You can just use tag as a visual notification of spam email or create a rule to automatically move the tagged emails to a junk folder.

If you use Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, or Qualcomm's Eudora Antispam is more tightly integrated by addition of spam-fighting functions to the toolbars of these email clients.

Allowed lists ensure the email from your trusted friends and family etc is never tagged by accident as being spam.

Overall a good spam filtering tool, especially if you use a version of Outlook or Eudora on a broadband connection.

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]