I have a small single-proprietorship computer business and over the past several years have recommended and installed hundreds of copies of Norton Internet Security on clients' systems. I've had very few issues that I could trace back to Norton. Yesterday I had a client contact me with an issue which I've never seen. He's using Outlook Express on an XP system and NIS 2012. Suddenly he began getting send failures of his outgoing e-mail, with a Norton pop-up box which reads "E-mail error 421 4.7.0 <smtp.watchtv.net> Error: Too many errors."
At first i though that his ISP was actually rejecting the e-mails, perhaps mistakenly flagging him as a spammer or some related issue, and that the message was only being displayed in a Norton window because Norton was providing a layer between his outgoing message and the ISP. However, further investigation revealed that turning off the outgoing e-mail check in NIS solves the issue. The only information which I have been able to find suggests that Norton is only passing along the error from the ISP, but with NIS disabled no error is generated and mail sends fine. Sending e-mail through his ISP's webmail client works fine too. This tells me that NIS is somehow at fault. I have temporarily disabled the outgoing scan to allow him to send e-mail, but this is a poor fix and ought to be addressed.
Anyone have an idea why this might suddenly be happening?
This situation is addressed in the following KB article, which suggests doing as you have already done - disable Outgoing Email Scanning. It does not state the reason for the issue, but it could be due to ISP requirements to use an outgoing email port that is not supported by Norton.
After disabling Outgoing Email Scanning, if Norton shows an alert and a "Fix Now" status, have the user hover the mouse cursor over the words, "Email Protection" on the Norton Advanced View main screen. A popup will appear that will provide an option for Norton to "Ignore" the "On/Off" status of this setting, which will again cause Norton to show the program status as "Secure," even with Email Scanning disabled.
By the way, all email scanning is redundant and not essential from a security standpoint. Outgoing scanning is especially expendible, since it does nothing to protect the user's own system at all, and most email recipients should have their own security software, anyway.
As much as I appreciate the response, and I really do, that's a disappointing solution from Symantec. I agree that outgoing e-mail scanning is not a high priority, but this shouldn't be happening, and it's very odd that it just started suddenly out of the blue. Your instructions on how to make Norton show "Secure" will be helpful, as I'll stop by his place and make that change. It will make him feel better. BTW, I have to wonder why the KB article didn't show up for me when I searched on this error.
I'm 99.9% sure that's the default port for OE, but I'll check. I can identify nothing about the system that's changed, and I'm certain that the client hasn't been messing around. It's about all he can do to use OE. He's a very "hands off" kind of user.
BTW, I have to wonder why the KB article didn't show up for me when I searched on this error.