I've been using Norton 360 for just over a year and I've been impressed with how well it filters out spam compared with the various other anti-spam products that I've tried. And it doesn't seem to filter out wanted emails either. Maybe there's a clever algorithm that if an email has not already been marked as spam then it continues to allow it through...
But over the last few months, I'm having to manually select more and more incoming emails as spam. At first I thought that the spammers are using some clever new technique that helps to bypass the filters and that the Norton web-detecting service (I have Web Query selected) will eventually learn to recognize them. However, that doesn't seem to be happening.
There are still too many spam emails not being detected. I get about 800 emails a day. Of these about 500 are spam. Norton detects 420 and I have to mark the other 80 manually. An 85% success rate isn't bad, but not quite good enough. The target should be 95%. I shouldn't have to mark more than around 20 spam mails a day.
So, what can i do to improve the spam detection mechanism...?
A feature suggestion:
it might be more effective to have finer training & detection options.
1. If the mail is definitely and universally spam then there should be a big THIS IS SPAM button - and the source details entered into the Norton web database to stop the same message being delivered to all other Norton users.
2. There should be another button that marks the message as "unwanted" but not necessarily spam. I get plenty of emails from newsletters that I don't necessarily want to unsubscribe from but which I'd like to send to the junk folder so as not clutter up my inbox. If I want information, I'll go the website or contact the sender myself. The point of this second tier of spam is that the sender shouldn't be added to the public, global spam list. I know some people are anti-spam 'purists', but there are the determined mass-mailing spammers - and these messages should be eradicated if possible - and then there are the smaller companies genuinely trying to generate business and offering a genuine service or product (I'm one of them!) and their efforts should not be penalized in the same way.
3. There should be another folder (or sub-folder) where 'NOT SURE' messages could be stored. This would reduce the need to work through the inbox and look out for spam; and make it easier to read through the messages quickly as a separate task to see if there are any legitimate messages to put back into the inbox. The rest can then be marked, tagged and sent to the junk folder.