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1. News About Spam Protection » Blog Archive » Extra-Suite Virus and Spam Protection says:

   October 15, 2008 at 9:24 am

   [...] Security Suites Are Rife With ProblemsWashington Post – Oct 9, 2005Both firms supply the antivirus programs offered in trial form on most new PCs– and which help advertise their full-fledged security suites. But the 2006 editions of these suites –McAfee Internet Security Suite 2006, $50 as a download or $70 as a box for Win 98 or newer; Symantec’s Norton Internet Security 2006, $70 for Win 2000 and XP — look unworthy of that success. For one thing, they face competition from Microsoft, which last year added effective firewall protection to Windows XP with its Service Pack 2 update and has since released a surprisingly good (though still in beta test) anti-spyware tool. For another, the complexity of the Symantec and McAfee suites seems to cause them to fail in ugly and destructive ways, according to readers who have written in to complain about these problems week after month after year. Most important, the latest McAfee and Symantec suites just don’t work all that well. Both excel only in their antivirus utilities– which you can buy separately from these all-purpose bundles. Each program correctly blocked viruses received via e-mail in two different e-mail applications and via AOL’s AIM instant-messenger software… Symantec and McAfee also tout spam filtering, but that applies only if you use the two mail programs they support– Microsoft’s antiquated Outlook Express and bloated Outlook. In addition, their filters assume your e-mail account runs on the Post Office Protocol standard, ignoring a newer, more convenient standard called IMAP. McAfee’s spam filter used an unnecessarily convoluted setup and didn’t allow the encrypted login required by a test Gmail account. The two security bundles can filter out ads on Web pages as well as in e-mail. Symantec’s ad-blocking did zap many of the more annoying commercials online, but at the cost of erasing non-ad graphics on occasion. McAfee’s ad-blocking, however, routinely dismantled innocent graphics — including the masthead graphic at the top of The Post’s home page– while allowing plenty of real ads to sail through. Don’t bother with Symantec’s weak parental controls.Related: Is Outsourcing a Security Risk? [...]