Norton Internet Security 2004 Review Admirable But Not Irresistible Eric Grevstad
Mon 12/15/03 -- It's not that the emperor has no clothes, but he's left one or two buttons undone.
As we said last year, antivirus and firewall protection is so critical to safe computing that we'll cheer any consumer smart enough to equip his or her PC with an up-to-date and self-updating package -- including those who skip comparison shopping and head straight for the best-selling Norton Internet Security from Symantec. And since unsolicited, ungodly e-mail has turned the old duo of online enemies into a trio, we're glad that Norton AntiSpam has joined Norton AntiVirus and Norton Personal Firewall in the $70 bundle -- and that the 2004 edition is a much stronger spam-fighter than the bare-bones filter introduced last year.
In other words, Norton Internet Security 2004 is a solid choice for set-it-and-forget-it online protection, as well as a better value than its retail-shelf-mate Norton SystemWorks 2004 (which teams Norton AntiVirus and an admittedly handy Internet cache- and cookie-cleaner with the stale Norton Utilities and CleanSweep). So why aren't we breaking out the five-star-review champagne?
Well, while we're the first to say that software pirates are law-breaking losers -- and aware that the Norton products' popularity makes them a favorite of spam-advertising CD copiers -- we're dismayed that Symantec is the first antivirus and firewall vendor to take the punish-the-customer step of product activation, as seen in Microsoft Windows XP and Office XP and 2003 (and tried, then withdrawn after overwhelming consumer complaint, by Intuit's TurboTax this year).
That said, Symantec's must-complete-within-15-days activation scheme is pretty painless -- it obliges you to type a lengthy code which is sent, along with another linked to your PC's hardware configuration, to the company with no personal information or need for registration involved. But there have been reports of a glitch in the feature causing repeated "The trial period has expired" messages, and we've believed since the DOS copy-protection days that activation inconveniences honest users without slowing down the real, mass-production pirates.
Stopping Spam (and Occasionally Outlook Express)
Libertarian philosophy aside, we're also unnerved that Norton AntiSpam 2004 broke our several-year history of trouble-free Symantec software use -- several times, using the right-click menu to "teach" the program that a message in Outlook Express' Inbox was spam caused the e-mail client to disappear. Our crashes didn't quite match the scenario described on Symantec's support site -- they seemed related to whether we'd enabled opening or saving of attachments, and happened in only a handful of the dozens of times we used the right-click feature -- but were unnerving nonetheless.
That's unfortunate, since AntiSpam 2004 otherwise goes well beyond the minimal scanner of last year's edition, which merely added a tag to suspect messages' subject line for you to configure a filter or destination folder in your e-mail program. The latter approach still works with any POP3 client, but Symantec's spam-catcher now offers more sophisticated Bayesian analysis and smooth, automatic integration with Outlook and Outlook Express -- and Eudora, although security newsletter author Scot Finnie reports a problem with that client, too.
On its very first try, Norton AntiSpam 2004 blocked 14 and allowed only two bad messages (and also flagged the only false positive in our testing, a newsletter that it promptly learned to let through). Over several weeks, it batted a respectable .875 in intercepting nuisance offers of big bucks, pharmaceuticals, and porn.
