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The Final (?) Word on the Symantec Premium Anti-Spam Service for Domino

Last week, we needed to set up a secondary web site hosted from the same server. We did this by migrating from the standard Domino web setup to a configuration which used site documents.

All worked well...

Mail routed successfully, the old and the new web sites worked and everyone was happy.

This morning, I applied the Microsoft Updates. Now these, being Microsoft products, required a server restart, so I dutifully complied.

When the server came back up, no mail was routing.

The Culprit
After a bit of searching around (not very much searching really because I now tend suspect the Symantec MailSecurity services FIRST), I found a message saying that;

"The Symantec Premium Anti-Spam service could not be started because you are using a site document".

I rang Symantec and following a relatively quick game of telephone lotto, I got transferred to the right person. Yep, they confirmed it... Sorry - It's not supported. End of story.

I disabled the service, but still mail did not route.
I restarted the router, http task etc but still mail did not route.

I still had Symantec on the phone, so I asked about the ports and about the Microsoft SMTP Server task. They said that I might have to worry about the ports, but not about the SMTP Server Task.

WRONG! The ports were fine, but the MS SMTP Server (POP Server) task was still running. I disabled this and restarted the Domino Service. Suddenly everything began to route nicely.

Lessons Learned?

  • Any service that needs the MS SMTP/POP Server to be running on a domino server isn't worth running.



  • Just because YOU think that there's no connection between something, (The router and the site document) doesn't mean that someone hasn't made their own connection



  • Whenever you reboot as a result of any MS Updates, you need to go through all the tests - file server access, smtp, http/https, nntp etc. because rebooting always changes the picture.



  • Nothing is ever as easy as it looks in IT




So, the bottom line is now that since we NEED site documents more than we need Anti-Spam, Symantec's AntiSpam service is OUT. If we end up with a spam problem, we'll be looking for a vendor that provides proper Notes/Domino support.
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