Norton Anti-Spam Goes Hosted

Symantec is now offering hosted anti-spam services. Symantec has for years offered it's popular Norton anti-spam e-mail product.

Here's a bit of trivia. The Norton brand name originated from Peter Norton. Norton authored the original Norton Utilities and a series of very well-written books on the IBM PC.

Any computer expert in the 80's had acquired a copy of Norton Utilities at some point. I may even have some of its remnants in my C:\UTIL directory.

He sold his company to Symantec in 1990. Mr. Norton appears to have kept a low-profile in recent years. Peter Norton did not have any technical involvement in Norton's current antispam solution or other subsequent products bearing his name.

Hosted spam blocking services work similar to other server-side anti-spam systems offered by ISPs. The main difference is their market. Typically they are used by small to mid-size companies that manage their own email servers, but don't have in-house spam email blocker software.

The company may change their DNS "MX" record to point to the service providers servers instead of their own. Email is then filtered by the third-party before being relayed on to the customer's server.

The main risk of this strategy is unwanted false positives. Users may or may not be notified about individual intercepted emails. Using a client-side spam tool usually doesn't pose this problem. Users can usually review blocked messages and restore them as needed.

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