Data

The Data filter in 1.5.1 gave me a lot of problems, and I’m sad to report that those problems have not been addressed in the new version of NetBarrier. This filter allows you to specify a string of text not allowed to leave your computer (such as unencrypted passwords or credit card data, or confidential documents), a great idea, if only it would work right! Just as in the previous version, however, when an alert is displayed telling you that protected data is trying to leave your computer, your only options are to allow the data to pass or to “stop list” the computer the information is being sent to…and if you pick the latter option, your computer conveniently freezes up. (In 1.5.1, it eventually unfroze on its own after several minutes, cutting you off from the machine you were sending data to; in my experience with 2.0.3, the freeze never thawed, and I was eventually forced to restart my Mac.) And that’s only the most basic problem I had with the Data filter; check out the original review for all the gory details.

While Intego didn’t fix the problems with the data filter, they did make it a bit more versatile. Now, when you specify data that can’t go out, you can specify services (by port number; there’s a drop-down menu of some common ones) through which the data can be transferred. Unfortunately, that’s as far as it goes: you can’t specify specific IP addresses (or a range) to which the data can be transferred, which would be quite useful.

The data filter is still easily the worst part of NetBarrier, and as good an idea as it is, I suggest you avoid using it. If someone tries to access protected data (or you inadvertently start sending it to someone), preventing the send will freeze your machine, at best for several minutes, and at worst you’ll have to force restart it. I really wish Intego had fixed this feature’s problems instead of just padding it with more options.

Banners

While there are few more praiseworthy goals than filtering ads and spam, NetBarrier is just not a good choice of program to achieve that goal…through no fault of NetBarrier’s own. I should note up front that I am undoubtedly spoiled by iCab’s phenomenal banner filtering and Mailsmith’s virtually unlimited filtering capabilities. If you are someone who has to use IE or Netscape for your browsing, you will likely find NetBarrier’s filtering to be better than the nothing built into your browser.

Why don’t I like NetBarrier’s filtering? Say you see an ad banner on a Web page. In iCab, you’d control-click, select Filter Image…, and it’d give you hoards of choices for filtering, either by size (automatically filling in the size of the selected image), URL, Server, filename, or path (of the image), or any of those things for the page being linked to. Whichever of those options you select is automatically filled in with the appropriate value for the image you control-clicked.

With NetBarrier, the process is not nearly so simple. First you have to find out the URL of the image…you can mouse over to get the page the ad links to (sometimes, if there isn’t a text message that appears instead of the URL), but that isn’t necessarily what you need. You have to filter the ad image, you can’t filter by what it links to, and sometimes the images are on a server other than the one they point to. Your best bet is to control click the ad, Open in New Window, and copy the URL. Then, you have to open NetBarrier, click the Filters button, then the Banner tab, then “Add,” paste the URL, delete the part you don’t want, maybe change one or both drop-down menu options (Host Name/URL Path and Contains/Is), click OK, close NetBarrier, and resume surfing. That’s a lot of steps.

Finally, in iCab, if you want to load a filtered image, it’s as easy as control-clicking to Load Missing Image. With NetBarrier, you have to figure out what the URL is, go to NetBarrier, figure out which filter criterion is keeping the desired image from loading, disable it, return to your browser and reload. You could more simply turn off banner filtering from the control strip, but then you’d get all the ad images next time, rather than just the one you want.

Spam

The Mail filter suffers from similar problems. I haven’t tried it, because of this line in the (highly impressive) manual: “If you receive an e-mail with [a filtered] subject, NetBarrier will erase it on your mail server, so you never have to download it.” You will never see a filtered message, so if it was a legitimate e-mail, you’ll never have a chance to rescue it, and you’ll never know you missed it.

The filter options are Subject/Author/Sender and Contains/ls. It’d be dangerous to use “contains”… no matter how careful you are, you’ll probably end up losing an e-mail you want to receive at some point. On the other hand, with “Is,” you’d likely only filter the one spam you received, and no others: spammers vary subjects, author names, and senders all the time.

A considerable number of spam messages I receive, however, have subjects ending in a large number of spaces followed by a four-digit number. Mailsmith lets me filter for that; most programs can filter e-mails with, say, four consecutive spaces in the Subject field, putting them into a “spam” folder. Scroll through real quick, verify that they’re junk, and delete them…or see that a friend’s e-mail got caught in there and rescue it. Since NetBarrier deletes offending messages from the server, you don’t get that chance to rescue misfiltered mail.

NetBarrier also doesn’t allow you to filter by the body of the message, or elements of the header other than those mentioned above. In the end, you’re much better off using the e-mail filtering capabilities in your e-mail client, which are certainly safer and likely more robust.

Cookies

Finally, on the “Surf” tab, you can turn off, count, and delete (all) cookies. Sort of. This might be an issue with iCab, just because it’s a less popular browser than Netscape and IE, but the delete cookies button just plain doesn’t work (it leaves all the cookies I’ve accepted intact), and the count feature counts cookies I don’t accept (perhaps it counts every cookie that’s offered to your computer, rather than every one you accept?). Fortunately, most if not all Web browsers now offer some form of cookie management, at least having an option to ask the user about accepting a particular cookie, or specifying one to delete.

You can also, from the Surf tab, prevent your computer from revealing which computer/browser you’re surfing from and the last Web site you visited. Again, I do this through iCab, but if you use another browser, these options might come in handy…just be aware you might get error messages from some sites saying your Web browser isn’t compatible with the site as a result of not revealing your (perfectly compatible) browser’s name.