Hi, Anonymous (Deano?).
I'm certainly not suggesting giving up the firewall or the antivirus. But
Norton has provided a way to configure it to allow OE email and news to work
without disabling it. It is, as you said, something very simple, but it's
NOT very intuitive.
In NIS, click Personal Firewall, then Configure (or double-click Personal
Firewall). On the next screen, click the Programs tab - this page is where
the action is. I chose Settings for "Default (Active)" and checked the box
for Turn on Automatic Program Control - so that programs that I don't
manually configure will be handled automatically. Then, under Manual
Program Control, scroll the list of programs all the way down to Microsoft
Outlook Express. If it's not there (after Microsoft Outlook and before
Microsoft Picture it!), Add it. If there is no list of programs, you will
probably want to do the Program Scan; this will take a while, even though
the screen says it will "quickly identify and configure all Internet
programs on your computer".
The tricky part is that you can't just choose Automatic and Multiple for OE.
You can pick Automatic, but you must click on the Multiple label under
Category and then choose Email from the list. Then Add another entry for
OE, if it does not already exist; this time, under Category, choose
Newsreaders. In the Internet Access column, you can choose either Automatic
or Permit All for these two lines (OE Email and OE Newsreader).
Now, NIS should allow email and news to come through the firewall, rather
than telling you "the connection to the server has failed".
It worked for me; I hope it works for you, too.- But I'm amazed and
disappointed that Symantec could not have handled this automatically!
On a similar note, I also found an obscure setting to allow Windows Update
to work through the Norton firewall. (Well, I found it by going to the
Symantec website.) WU was always telling me "Thanks, but you need to be
running Windows" - and, of course, I DO have WinXP. To get WU to work, I
had to temporarily disable NIS, and it worried me to do that, even
temporarily. The key is in, of all places, NIS Privacy Control! In NIS,
click Privacy Control | Configure, then click Advanced. On the long list of
programs, scroll to microsoft.com, click the Plus to expand it so that you
can click windowsupdate.microsoft.com. Finally, click the Global Settings
tab on the right side of the window and check Permit in the top section,
Information about your browser. How's THAT for intuitive? :^{ Symantec's
instructions for this are at:
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPOR...Document&prod=&ver=&src=sg&pcode=&svy=&csm=no
I still haven't found a couple of settings in NIS that keep me from feeling
like a trained monkey. I'm interrupted continually by the "found a virus in
email" pop-up window and have to click Finished to let it go to the next
Swen virus message. If I get 100 of these today, I have to press Finished
100 times! If I don't, NIS will just wait patiently for hours until I do,
delaying everything else I need to get done. And there's another setting
somewhere, I'm sure, that will keep me from having to click "Always Block"
every time there's an attempt to connect to my computer. NIS is saving a
log of all the computers I've blocked, but I hope I don't have to block
every one of the 256 * 256 * 256 * 256 computer addresses in the Internet
individually, one by one! Oh well, sorry about the digression. We were
talking about OE, not about obscure settings in NIS, weren't we. ;^{
RC
