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Norton Internet Security Email Bug

Here's What Happened...

Everything was working fine all morning. Then, I got a pop up asking if I wanted to install an update to my Norton Internet Security 2005 package. (Some people just let it apply updates automatically whenever they want. I prefer to have it ask me first in case I'm in the middle of something and don't want to give up the CPU power right then.) Anyway, I let it apply the update and went on with my work.

 

A while later I got a notice that my Outlook email had failed. It said "A time-out occurred while communicating with the server." This is not all that uncommon and usually fixes itself quickly so I didn't worry too much about it. When it persisted for an hour or two I contacted my ISP and they were unaware of any problems on their end. They suggested it might be my firewall (part of NIS.) Duh!

 

I checked the settings on NIS and discovered that Outlook was already permitted to access the Internet so I didn't know what needed to be changed. It was time to go looking for help.

 

I went to the http://www.symantec.com web site and worked my way through their support menus like this:

www.symantec.com - click on "Support"

Click on "Get Home & Home Office Support"

Click on "More" under "Technical Issues"

Click on "Continue" under "View Top Support Issues"

Click on "2005" under "Norton Internet Security"

Click on "Cannot send or receive email with regular email..." under "Top Support Issues"

I finally arrived at this page:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/nip.nsf/docid/2005020123585136?OpenDocument&src=hot&prod=Norton%20Internet%20Security&ver=2005&csm=no&seg=hho&tpre=

 

You may have a different version of Norton or perhaps you even have a different problem. In that case, perhaps you'll have to vary the above steps to meet your needs. This page is just about the one current problem that I experienced.

 

The page given in the above link describes several different symptoms that can occur and there are apparently several different causes. Naturally, the cure for my problem was at the bottom of the page in their "Section 4" and involved adding incoming and outgoing mail server addresses to trusted sites in Norton Personal Firewall. I did so and everything worked just fine again. You can read the details at their web site if you don't know how to do that. If you're symptoms are just like mine, you're also using NIS 2005, and have bumped into this problem in early January 2006, I'd skip right to section 4. It can't hurt and may save you a lot of wasted time trying the other fixes.

 

I've already bumped into another person with exactly the same problems so the issue seems to be more than minor though I don't know how widespread it is. I thought it might be worth posting a page to try to save others some grief.

 

While I will grumble and mutter about Symantec and wonder why they don't test their software better, I have to say that overall, they do a pretty good job. They did have a web page with the fix (though a fix to fix their fix would have been even better. As another measure of their quality, PC Magazine recently reported a study by AV-Test of Anti-Virus programs versus the new WMF Exploit that is currently the major worry. Norton caught 73 of the 73 variants of the problem while according to their study F-Prot only got 54 and AVG a lousy 13 out of 73. Those figures were as of January 1, 2006 so one hopes F-Prot and AVG have improved since then. Still, it shows that Symantec is on the ball at keeping their product up to date with current threats. I don't plan to switch vendors!

 

Good Luck!

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