Customer Reviews
SSSLLLOOOWWW and crashes 
2004-09-27
Norton AntiSPAM is slow and crashes. I am using Outlook Express and the experience might be different for Outlook. But here is what I have found.
With Norton AntiSPAM installed, my Outlook Express is slow at doing everything. Deleting an email takes four seconds when it used to be immediate. Switching folders also takes about 4 seconds. This greatly slows down everything that I do with email. Even the [Delete] key has become slow, although the [Backspace] key has not.
The "This is SPAM" feature takes about 10 seconds to execute. It is so slow that sometimes it deletes the wrong message because a new email arrives in the middle of execution. Also, I crashes periodically. Symantec acknowledges that it crashes, but does not have a solution.
By the way, I have a 2.2GHz Pentium machine with 1GB RAM. So I don't think my computer is the problem.
As for the SPAM filtering, it works fairly well. I have very little SPAM get through. I have had no false Positives (i.e. good mail getting labeled as SPAM). However, I don't think it is worth the aggravation that the software causes.
I cannot believe that the same company that make the very fine AntiVirus makes the lousy AntiSPAM.
I hope they get this under control because we need AntiSPAM solutions that work.
Meanwhile, they have my $40 and are enjoying a nice mean at a restaurant rather that staying a work late to fix the problems.
Thanks
John C. Briggs
Bug has still not been resolved 2004-09-12
As many reviewers before I am experiencing this bug in NAS that renders the product completely unusable. On average one in 50 spam mails makes NAS choke, i.e. the e-mail download grinds down to a halt, and the only workaround is to wait for on average 15 minutes until NAS has "digested" that particular problem mail, or alternatively exit Outlook, log off, log on again, disable NAS, start Outlook again, download mail (then with NAS disabled no problems occur), and clean spam by hand on behalf of NAS. The bug occurs not only when using Outlook or OE, but also when simply logging by telnet to the POP server. When following there the screen output created by NAS (NAS seems to add information to the header of the e-mail, and that can be seen in the DOS box when NAS operates), for those specific problem mails it is obvious that suddenly NAS slows down almost to a standstill.
I had asked Symantec tech support about this issue back in April 2004 when I had installed NAS for the first time, they could not help me then, and by today the bug is still not fixed (which is a shame - what do they have their automatic live update for if they are not using it for distributing patches for their faulty software.)
Therefore I strongly recommend to everyone:
Do not buy this product!!!
There is a fair chance (as can be seen by the numerous comments of users with similar problems) that NAS may not be working as expected on your machine.
This software sucks! 2004-08-29
If I could give this software less than one star I would.
If you dont beleave me read the 66+ messages tell you this software sucks too. If you really need spam control.
I recomend just changing your mail client to thunderbird. http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
it's free, it's fast, It works, has a great spam filter built in.
If you really want to throw away $40. heck just set it on fire.
or better ye just send it to me. I have to find a way to get back the cash I spent on this pile of trash.
Garbage 2004-08-17
3 hours ago I installed this rubbish and I still can't access my Outlook mail. There is very little support apart from searching through tomes of databases and "have you searched our FAQ's" line of help. I could have deleted all the spam I have received in my life in the time I have spent trying to get this program to work. Having bought the software there is no way to get my money back, so this is tantamount to highway robbery. No wonder there are so many serial hackers around. This program IS spam!! Crap, packaged in a nice box.
Proceed with caution 
2004-08-16
First, let me say that the anti-spam features work. After the install, my spam dropped from over 200 message per day to nearly zero, with NAS 2004 accurately zapping the spam messages. My inbox suddenly became manageable again.
Now for the bad news. My PC, a Toshiba laptop with Windows XP Home, had been rock solid for eighteen months. Rarely any type of crash or problem. In the 24 hours since I installed NAS 2004, I have had a "blue screen of death" crash/reboot, numerous errors with the print spooler, and a couple of "A serious error has occurred" messages from various applications. Felt like I was back to using Windows 98.
So, with regret, I have uninstalled NAS 2004. Maybe they'll get this cleaned up in NAS 2005.
Installation nightmare 2005-02-22
I installed NAS with windows XP and it would not work.
After several e-mails and phone calls to their support desk in India they had me delete all my Norton programs (pc anywhere and Norton Antivirus) and run some patches and delete files and delete items in regedit.
Now I get a 3 different errors when I start my computer, I can't do microsoft windows updates and Antivirus and antispam do not work. The support is very slow to respond and don't seem to know what they are doing.
I will probably have to reformat my machine and start again
A waste of money, time and energy; crazy-making 2005-02-20
Worked fine initially. Then it deteriorated. Took forever to enter a posting into Norton Antispam (to designate it as spam). Then inexplicably my e-mail on Outlook Express 6 got very buggy. Finally, I started getting duplicates, triplicates and quadruplicates of the same spam with minor variations, endlessly; and Norton Antispam began preceding the sender information in every incoming e-mail, including my professional listserv e-mails, with "[Norton Antispam]" (as shown here, in brackets). This resulted in my needing to delete the "[Norton Antispam"] when I replied to an e-mail posting. At one point I noticed that my listserv postings (professional group communications) had very sharply diminished in number. Ultimately, I found that Norton Antispam had-- apparently for my convenience-- segregated these into the Norton Antispam folder. There I found some 2,000 e-mails, all with "[Norton Antispam"] preceding the senders' addresses. Many of these were my professional listserv messages; others were the usual obnoxious scams and spams for which one purchases antispam software; however, when I tried to click on the button that tells Norton Antispam that "this is spam," I found it to be greyed out, and NONE OF THE MESSAGES COULD NOW BE DESIGNATED AS SPAM, apparently because they now had been funneled to me THROUGH Norton Antispam, like a gift. (I was, however, given the option to click on the button to indicate that "this is NOT spam.")
The wrestling with bugs in my system went on for hours and days, beginning with my internet service provider, going to Microsoft (where, for a fee, they helped somewhat), and continuing with Norton. Norton's customer support was execrable. On the final day of my efforts to get help, at one point I was on the phone for more than an hour, on hold. Support staff seemed befuddled, clueless, and ready to repeat what another support person had done that was useless, despite my protests. I was prepared to pay the nearly $30 they asked for their "help," but balked when the last technician was ready to charge me an additional nearly $70 because, supposedly, a virus had gotten into my e-mail. I wasn't convinced; very recently Norton Antivirus had scanned my computer and found no viruses. I had to ask to speak to a supervisor because she refused to take "no" for an answer to this billing. Norton's other products have so far worked well for me, incidentally.
Finally, I disabled the Norton Antispam and deleted all messages with the "[Norton Antispam]" imprimatur. This has apparently solved problems for now, and I just "block sender" on the spam.
Slow and Not Very Effective 2005-01-23
It takes far too long for the program to block an email that you just received. It is not that accurate. I would not use it if if was free.
Unbelievable That They Even Ship It 2004-10-04
I can't even believe Symantec would ship this in the condition it is in. Further, if it is so important to them to have some kind of antispam software in their suite, I can't believe they haven't put lots of resources into fixing it via their live update feature.
Summary of the problems:
It doesn't work... It's not catching spam.
When you select a spam e-mail that it missed and tell it "this is spam" to train it, it is horribly slow... It just took an hour to process the 300 spams I received over the weekend.. This is on a 2.2 GHz machine, and task manager shows that CPU is the bottleneck... 100% CPU utilization for about an hour.
It is not correctly integrated with Outlook. Whenever it processes a message, it triggers Outlook to think it is a virus accessing your address list. The best you can do is to tell Outlook to let it have access for 10 minutes at a time. In other words, if you get more than about 30 spam messages, you actually have to wait around and do a three step process every 10 minutes to get it to keep processing!
NOTE: SpamBully and other products do not do this, so this is NOT an Outlook problem. It is a problem with the way that Norton Antispam talks to Outlook.
In short, a horribly flawed product that should not be shipping until these issues are fixed.
DO NOT Buy This Crappy Software!! 2004-10-04
There is a huge bug in this software and it will not work with Outlook. The Anti-Spam toolbar causes Outlook to shut down and an error message pops up. This happens every time you start Outlook for the first time of the day with a new user. The folks at Symantec have known about the bug for well over a year but refuse to fix it. They blame Outlook, but they are the ones who designed this software to (not) work with Outlook. This company obviously does not care about its customers and their problems. Next time I will buy McAfee or something and stay far away from this company.
