Feel my wrath, Symantec!
Apologies... I've been on another one of those lovely courses up in old London Town, this time on ASP.NET. Better than sitting in an office, I suppose.
Anyway, I know you've missed it, so here's another moan. This time about Norton Internet Security.
The other day, my email stopped working. I couldn't connect to either Blueyonder or Compuserve, for either SMTP or POP3. Strange. T'internet worked fine, as did Ele's Hotmail. This ruled out several things: It's not Outlook Express, 'cos her Hotmail works through it, and other internet ports are fine, only 25 and 110 were not working. I rebooted my router and cable modem with no success and assumed it to be a Virgin Media problem, because since Telewest got absorbed into their NTL-hell, nothing has worked quite as well. Plus, their status page said there were internet issues in my area.
But the next day it still didn't work. I tried from my laptop, and this worked. So now it's not Virgin's fault either. Thinking it might be my router at fault, I slapped the Visual Basic CD I'd come across a couple of days before into my laptop and within about 2 minutes had built a little application to listen on port 25, i.e. pretend to be an SMTP mailserver (the miracle of VB!). I couldn't connect to this from my desktop, so I assumed my router was doing odd things. I tried a different port, and it worked. Thinking it a bit odd that my router would block only 25 and 110 I started to think this wasn't the problem. I disabled the Norton firewall on my desktop but it still made no difference, but I was still convinced the router was fine. I then remembered that I'd let LiveUpdate run and download various Norton updates...
I tried searching on the Symantec website for help. It told me that if I was experiencing problems getting emails then I had to upgrade to the latest version. I was running the 2006 version so I let it upgrade to 2007. Fortunately it didn't try and charge me anything. And it fixed the problem! Hurrah! Only it seems that the 2007 version doesn't come with the AntiSpam stuff, which when I thought about it is why I didn't upgrade to it at renewal-time earlier in the year.
So, because their upgrades screwed everything up I've now got an inferior product to the one I paid for. Not much inferior, because the AntiSpam was useless anyway, but that's not the point.
After this, and after both my parents and Ele's parents both had to buy new PC's after attempting to put Norton onto their (admittedly aging) PC's, I don't think I'll bother paying for it again next year.
Anyway, I know you've missed it, so here's another moan. This time about Norton Internet Security.
The other day, my email stopped working. I couldn't connect to either Blueyonder or Compuserve, for either SMTP or POP3. Strange. T'internet worked fine, as did Ele's Hotmail. This ruled out several things: It's not Outlook Express, 'cos her Hotmail works through it, and other internet ports are fine, only 25 and 110 were not working. I rebooted my router and cable modem with no success and assumed it to be a Virgin Media problem, because since Telewest got absorbed into their NTL-hell, nothing has worked quite as well. Plus, their status page said there were internet issues in my area.
But the next day it still didn't work. I tried from my laptop, and this worked. So now it's not Virgin's fault either. Thinking it might be my router at fault, I slapped the Visual Basic CD I'd come across a couple of days before into my laptop and within about 2 minutes had built a little application to listen on port 25, i.e. pretend to be an SMTP mailserver (the miracle of VB!). I couldn't connect to this from my desktop, so I assumed my router was doing odd things. I tried a different port, and it worked. Thinking it a bit odd that my router would block only 25 and 110 I started to think this wasn't the problem. I disabled the Norton firewall on my desktop but it still made no difference, but I was still convinced the router was fine. I then remembered that I'd let LiveUpdate run and download various Norton updates...
I tried searching on the Symantec website for help. It told me that if I was experiencing problems getting emails then I had to upgrade to the latest version. I was running the 2006 version so I let it upgrade to 2007. Fortunately it didn't try and charge me anything. And it fixed the problem! Hurrah! Only it seems that the 2007 version doesn't come with the AntiSpam stuff, which when I thought about it is why I didn't upgrade to it at renewal-time earlier in the year.
So, because their upgrades screwed everything up I've now got an inferior product to the one I paid for. Not much inferior, because the AntiSpam was useless anyway, but that's not the point.
After this, and after both my parents and Ele's parents both had to buy new PC's after attempting to put Norton onto their (admittedly aging) PC's, I don't think I'll bother paying for it again next year.
posted by Nej at
1:12 pm
2 Comments:
Neil
I work with Symantec in public relations and would be happy to set you up with someone from tech support. Please send me an email at amandaj@connectpr.com if you would like someone to contact you directly to resolve your issue.
best
Amanda Jones
PR for Symantec
By
Anonymous, at 7:43 pm
Amanda,
Thank you for your kind offer, but I've resolved the problem now by the upgrade. As I mentioned, I don't have the Anti-Spam feature now as it was removed from the "upgrade", but as it was not particularly good anyway, it won't be missed too much.
I'm glad to see that Symantec and ConnectPR monitor blogs to watch out for unhappy customers, though!
By
Nej, at 1:27 pm
Post a Comment
<< Home