TechWatch: Stop Spam, Crush Viruses, Protect Networks

White-List Your E-Mail
The best way to stop spam is to have a product that will scan your inbox and quarantine all those annoying organ-enhancement, cheap-drug and cheap-mortgage announcements, while letting the people in your address book through. This approach is called white-listing, and Qurb is the first product that I've seen that gets it mostly right. The downsides are that you'll need to train it to accept messages from mailing-list servers and other e-mail sources that you want to see. In addition, you'll still need a solid antivirus solution and some patience in scanning through the rejected messages to make sure nothing legit gets bumped. Qurb is geared toward Outlook V. 2000 and later and Outlook Express V. 5.5 and later (it is compatible with AOL and Yahoo! mail, but not Eudora). I tested Qurb on Windows XP with an Outlook contact list of close to 5,000 entries; on a 500-MHz Pentium III it ran rather slowly, taking several minutes to download my e-mail; I had problems running it on slower machines, too. Still, it beats many of the other antispam solutions out there. If you are an Outlook user who has extensive contacts and you don't want to create your own custom Outlook mail-processing rules, it's worth a try.

Qurb v. 1.0, www.qurb.com Price: $29.95

Online Antivirus Scanner
My standby antivirus scanner is Norton. The 2004 version is a solid workhorse, but it doesn't catch everything, particularly spyware and some of the more annoying programs that aren't quite viruses but still clog up your system. So, lately, I have been using Panda Software's ActiveScan online scanner. ActiveScan catches cookie-trackers, peer-to-peer listeners and other oddities that can slow down your system. The ActiveScan software--which takes just a few minutes to download from Panda's site before your first use--is free, and its ActiveX controls are simple to operate. Panda also makes its own Titanium Antivirus software, but the advantage to using the online scanner is that you never have to worry about your definitions being outdated; Panda updates ActiveScan's definitions at least once a day. For those investigating infected machines, this is a must for your toolbox.

Panda ActiveScan, www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/com/activescan\_principal.htm Price: Free

New Firewall For smbs Big On Features
For the small-to-midsize market, there are plenty of firewall-like solutions out there from Netgear and Linksys. My personal favorites are from SonicWall, and I usually recommend them to people who are concerned about their home or small-office security but don't have the expertise to configure heavy-duty products. But now Fortinet has taken things a step further with the FortiGate 60 firewall, which is priced competitively and offers an impressive range of features. Granted, it is a bit more complex to set up, but that is because it does so much more. The standard VPN, NAT, four-port LAN switch, Web configuration and DHCP server are complemented by intrusion-detection, intrusion-prevention and traffic-shaping functions, antivirus screening and content filtering along with two WAN-link ports for setting up redundant Internet connections. Fortinet makes a lower-end version with fewer ports and higher-end versions with more features, but the FortiGate 60, which won a VARBusiness Tech Innovators Award last December, is a nice compromise for most SOHO and SMB needs.

FortiGate 60 firewall, www.fortinet.com Price: $995