<>Thank you very much.<>

<><> I really appreciate it.

<>

In the aftermath of the problem with Norton AV deleting WinPMail, I felt I should share with you what has been going on behind the scenes.

Early on in the piece, after I found I could not access the Symantec false positive reporting page and could not get any common sense out of their offshored tech support, I had my lawyer send a fax to their legal section (working on the assumption that the legal people would have the necessary hooks into the Symantec organization to be able to get the situation resolved quickly). My lawyer and I received an incredibly poor response from what I assume was a low-level legal clerk at Symantec, but by that stage, other wheels had already begun grinding. The response from the legal person was probably the lowest point in the whole debacle for me, but from there, Symantec has hardly put a foot wrong.

As you all noticed, they issued corrections to their signature database very rapidly indeed (far more rapidly than I would have thought possible from a large organization). One of their senior engineers also had the courtesy and good grace to join up here and post a message apologizing for the problem and giving a succinct, accurate update on the situation. Top marks for that - it's one of the best bits of PR I have seen in a long time, and he deserves a ton of kudos.

This morning, a very senior official from Symantec rang me (out of courtesy, I won't name names, but I can tell you that she is in a position to make things happen). She was apologetic, friendly, and co-operative, and it was a pleasure dealing with her. We have now reached a number of arrangements that should prevent anything like this ever happening again, including the establishment of excellent back channels into the Symantec QA and testing process and solid 24/7 contacts within the organization.

So, it was an unfortunate incident, but I think it's important to give Symantec proper credit for recognizing that and doing all in their power to correct it.

On an unrelated note, I have decided to promote the priority of a recovery tool I have been planning to write for some time. This tool will make it much easier to recover from the types of reinstallation problem many people encountered in the aftermath of this incident, and will also serve as a nice backup/restore facility for folders and mailboxes. I can't offer a release date yet, but I can work on this in isolation from the Pegasus Mail codebase itself, so it should not suffer the delays that other developments have recently experienced. Watch these forums for more details as they become available.

Cheers!

-- David --

<><>Is it safe to run Live Update now to update my Norton Antivirus definitions? <><>

Please advise.

<>Thank you.

[quote user="agamemnon"]

<><>Is it safe to run Live Update now to update my Norton Antivirus definitions? <><>

Please advise.

<>Thank you. [/quote]

Yes it is.