Jonathan's Musings

I hate it when software companies feel the need to take a good product which serves a need, and try to make it serve every (even loosely) related need and screw it up in the process!

ZoneLabs has a great firewall in ZoneAlarm. As a firewall it offers everything that a regular user could want with a clean interface and both network and application protection. I love if both for its ability to keep my PC protected from outside attacks and also (perhaps more so) to stop some of my programs doing unwanted or unnecessary Internet requests. And best of all... it's free!

I got a notice today however, that ZoneAlarm 7.0 was available for download.

Being the software freak I am, I always try to keep up to date with patches, new versions etc. so I dutifully downloaded the new version. I saw that it was 3 times bigger than my previous version (6.5) which gave me pause for thought, but I installed it nonetheless.

After installation and restarting, my first annoyance came with extra popups which I didn't want and hadn't expected. After giving those the bat, I opened the program to see if there where any significant differences. Nope. None that were apparent.

Then I was assaulted by another popup from Outlook and was surprised to find that ZoneAlarm had installed a mail filtering add-in to Outlook! I had not expected this, nor asked for it, nor being told about it anywhere!

I consulted the change logs and documentation and saw no mention of this. I also found no way to turn it off, which, seeing as I already use SpamBayes to fulfil my SPAM Filtering needs, was rather unacceptable!

I searched the Internet for clues to this predicament and found no end of complaints about this problem. I did find a solution for disabling the plugin but by that stage I had already decided to roll back to the previous version.

This whole process involed about 1 hour of my time what with downloading, restarting and installing, and now I am back at square one and have to "teach" ZoneAlarm all over again because it deleted all my settings in the rollback process.

My Conclusion:
ZoneAlarm 7.0 (free) seems to represent no significant improvement upon ZoneAlarm 6.5 (free) and is 3 times the size, indicating uncontrolled software bloat. It also includes this unnecessary mail filter component which requires more hassle to disable than what it's worth, and is not as functional or configurable as other mail filter packages out there.

My Advice:
Stick with ZoneAlarm 6.5 (free) for your firewall needs and use a separate software package for your mail filtering needs (I suggest SpamBayes for advanced users). When a new version of ZoneAlarm comes out, wait a few weeks and search for any forum postings about it. Only if there are no untoward issues reported during this time, then install it.