NIS 2004 gets its first new component for a while in the form of Norton AntiSpam 2004, a separately packaged and more functional version of software available in last year’s Norton. The suite also comprises AntiVirus 2004 and Personal Firewall 2004.
Product manager Anson Lee said that AntiSpam has a more sophisticated Bayesian class engine for identifying spam from incoming email. It allows user-configurable white and black lists, in order to help reduce the false positive rate, he said.
AntiSpam also integrates more easily with popular email clients including Outlook, Outlook Express and Eudora, Lee said. Previously, spam was merely tagged as such, and users had to write a filter to automatically delete or quarantine it. Now that is automated.
Personal Firewall 2004 has had features added to deal with mobile users who may connect to the internet from different networks. It can also be used as a parental control to block access to URLs in a database of categorized domains that Symantec maintains.
As previously reported, AntiVirus 2004 now also blocks so-called spyware – software designed to send information about the user to somebody else on the internet, which installs itself often without the user’s knowledge or consent.
While each product is available separately, there are some features only available when the user has the whole NIS package installed. For example, Personal Firewall can leverage virus definitions in AntiVirus, Lee said.
The company is hoping buyers will realize the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and buy the whole suite. Symantec is selling NIS 2004 for $69.95, the same price as it cost last year when the AntiSpam was not a separate component.
Source: Computerwire
