Norton antispam and pop/smtp port changes

[cmendla]

I ran into a situation where our local comcast changed the ports they want you to use for smtp and pop3 from the standard ports.

when I changed the ports, norton antispam would crash outlook every time you started it until I disabled the antispam plugin. It seems that NAS is expecting standard ports and can't handle non standard ports.

I was wondering if anyone else has run into this and if you found a fix.

thanks

cg

[bill]

I've personally never heard of anyone having anything good to say about Norton Anti Spam at all. It appears to be the source of many problems. I would suggest disabling it entirely. There are plenty of free anti-spam programs available that will do a much better job (SpamBayes is one of the best for Outlook) .

[cmendla]

I found a solution to the problem I posted. (Comcast changing the incoming and outgoing ports)

All I needed to do was to go into Norton Internet Security and go into program control. Go into Outlook and look for the http settings. Add the ports there.

I do agree with the previous poster that Norton AS is not an optimal solution. On the other hand, it usually works for those people who already have NIS.

For myself, I use Spamassassin at the server level and then rely on norton antispam and outlooks junk folder to id most of the spam. Then I use outlook rules to sort the suspected spam into junk folders. That way I can do a real quick eyeball before flushing it.

SpamAssassin - I have it set so that obvious spam gets sent off to oblivion and the rest gets marked as spam in the subject. Kills approx 75% of the spam

Outlook Junk Mail - No configuration possible. Kills about 5%

Norton Antispam - I don't bother marking messages as spam because of the way it handles things. It is really a waste of time. I do mark messages I want with "this is not spam". Kills about 15%

Rules - All messages markes as spam in the subject go into the junk mail folder.

All told, I have about 200 potential email messages a day. The techniques above keep things manageable where only about 3 to 5 spams actually make it into my inbox (Mostly graphic spam) I end up with maybe a dozen or so false positives that are pretty easy to find (assuming that there aren't false positives being killed by spamassassin)