There are two main reasons to buy a security suite rather than a collection of individual security tools. The first is price—buying firewall, antivirus, antispam, parental control, and more individually would add up to much more than the cost of a suite. The second is integration. If your security components all work together, sharing code when possible, the impact on system performance is reduced. At $79.95 for three licenses ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 2013 is definitely cheaper than a collection of separate products. However, the majority of its components are licensed from other vendors, not created by Check Point, and it shows.

This suite's main window looks very similar to that of ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus + Firewall 2013. Both products divide the main window into three large panels, each of which links to a page with direct access to related security components. And in both the right-most page, labeled "Identity + Data," holds the backup and credit protection components.

The free suite devotes the other two panels (and their corresponding pages) to antivirus and firewall protection. The full-scale commercial suite merges those two into the Computer page and adds a new Internet page that gives you access to the antispam and parental control components.

Comprehensive Spam Filtering

ZoneAlarm's antispam component, powered by SonicWall, offers significantly more features than the antispam found in most suites. To start, it filters both POP3 and IMAP email in Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and Windows Mail. If you're using Outlook, it can also filter Exchange-based accounts. Many products handle POP3 only. However, because of its extensive email client integration, ZoneAlarm doesn't filter spam for unsupported clients, so those using Thunderbird or Eudora are out of luck.

Many spam filtering systems let you whitelist your regular correspondents or blacklist known spammers. Some let you whitelist (or blacklist) whole domains, so, for example, no email from within your company is blocked. ZoneAlarm does both, and can also whitelist messages received through mailing lists, where the sender might be different each time.

The spam filter takes many characteristics into account in deciding whether a message is spam. You can increase or decrease its sensitivity to content in six specific areas, among them Gambling and Sexual Content. You can also tweak how aggressively it identifies spam overall.

One characteristic of a spam message is that the same message goes to thousands or even millions of addresses. ZoneAlarm's antispam takes into account the possibility that other users have already seen the message and marked it as spam. You can tweak the degree to which it uses this "collaborative filter" in flagging spam. Finally, you can set it to block all messages written in over a dozen languages and language groups.

If you mostly exchange email with a collection of known and trusted friends, you may want to enable the challenge-response feature. At its highest level, it puts all messages from unknown senders on hold and responds with a note asking the sender to simply click the "add me" button. Real people will do it; spammers won't. It's quite a clever system. You can also set it to use the challenge system only for messages that it can't clearly identify as spam or not.

Many of us check mail on our smartphones, and spam filtering isn't always available. ZoneAlarm solves that problem with an option to forward only valid mail to your mobile device. Clever!