How to Kick Out the Trash

By Maryanne Murray Buechner

Are your fingers tired of deleting the daily influx of junk e-mail one message at a time? Don't despair. Most services that provide Internet or Web-based e-mail also offer free tools that will take out the trash for you (although if you're not careful, they will throw birth announcements out with the bath water). If you need something a little more discriminating, there is plenty of software you can buy that will help you filter your own mail. There's still no such thing as a 100% spam-free In box, but if you're willing to make the effort, you can keep the e-noise down to a dull roar.

A survey of the field, starting from the top:

--AOL The largest Internet provider is also the No. 1 conduit for spam, which may explain why each new version boasts ever more powerful spam protection. New mail controls let you set up custom filters, but they leave a lot of room for improvement. For example, you can create "allow" and "block" lists on AOL, but there's no shortcut for uploading an entire address book. You have to type or paste them in one by one. Nor can you autopopulate your allow list with each new person you e-mail. Your best bet may be to simply reshuffle your In box according to the type of sender. AOL marks all incoming mail with one of three icons: a yellow envelope for mail from People I Know (based on your address book and Buddy List), a parcel with string identifies mail from bulk senders, and an orange envelope and magnifying glass for messages from unknown senders. Look for new tools in the next version, AOL 9.0, due out this summer.

--EARTHLINK Launched in late May, EarthLink's SpamBlocker does everything AOL's mail controls do and more, including several opportunities to retrieve legitimate mail that you might otherwise miss. Once you activate Suspect Mail Blocking, your personal address book becomes your white list (EarthLink's version of AOL's allow list). Rather than block new senders entirely, EarthLink sends them a "challenge response" that will effectively cut off bulk mailers--and probably annoy some friends in the process. You can request daily or weekly reports that list the headers from messages that have been held up, giving you a chance to okay delivery. And you can set your mail preferences to automatically white-list new people you send mail to.

--MSN For subscribers, MSN's Version 8 provides system-wide filters that are smart enough to intercept a fair percentage of incoming junk mail before it lands in your In box. The junk is deposited into a separate folder from which you can retrieve messages that shouldn't have been blocked. True to its geeky heritage, Microsoft provides tools for custom filtering that offer users more flexibility than AOL's mail controls, though AOL is busy playing catch-up.

--HOTMAIL The filters built in to MSN's free mail service are easy to manage and work reasonably well. Using a simple menu, you set the threshold from moderate to exclusive. The highest level accepts email only from people listed in your address book or from domains you put on your safe list (newsletters you subscribe to, websites you've shopped at, etc.). You can have spam deleted immediately, but if you've chosen the most aggressive filtering option, you'll probably want to set up a junk-mail folder that you can scan for false positives (then retrieve them with a click of the THIS IS NOT JUNK button). Warning: if you maintain a junk-mail folder, those messages will count against your 2-MB storage limit.

--YAHOO Since Yahoo rolled out an enhanced version of its SpamGuard back-end filtering system in March, spam reports from users dropped 40%, according to a representative. The bulk-mail filter clears a good bit of spam from your In box but not all. It also traps quite a bit of legitimate mail, so be sure to check it before executing a mass delete. You can create custom filters based on such things as keywords in a message's subject line, but these are the easiest filters to fool. Some spammers simply add a period in the middle of a word (s.ex). A THIS IS SPAM button lets you block future mail from a particular address, but limits you to 100 (or 200 for premium users).

--ROLL YOUR OWN All the major e-mail programs (Microsoft's Outlook, Apple's Mail, Qualcomm's Eudora) provide software tools for building personalized junk-mail filters. The Mail program that comes with Apple's OS X is probably the best. It learns to separate the wheat from the e-chaff during a training session, and then lets you fine-tune the results with JUNK/NOT JUNK buttons. Like Outlook and Eudora, Mail also lets you write your own specific filtering rules, but that's a tedious and potentially endless exercise. Outlook users might be better off buying a third-party program, and the market's flooded with them. Ella ($29.95, openfieldsoftware.com stands out for its simplicity. Like Apple's Mail, it uses an adaptive engine to "learn" your preferences--what qualifies as junk, which messages are top priority and which can be put aside for later--and organizes your e-mail accordingly. QURB ($24.95; qurb.com and Mailblocks ($9.95 a year; www.mailblocks.com are also worth a look.

Finally, there's a community project that attacks spam the way Hollywood used to attack suspected communists: with a blacklist. For $4.99 a month, SpamNet www.cloudmark.com checks your incoming mail against its own ever expanding database. The service's 475,000-plus members contribute by "voting" on what's spam and what isn't, using the BLOCK and UNBLOCK buttons that the SpamNet program adds to your Outlook task bar. Enough votes from individual members and a message is blocked for all. With thousands of reports coming in every second, it can be pretty effective.

If some spam gets through--as some inevitably will--you can always go back to filtering it the old-fashioned way: by hitting the delete key. --By Maryanne Murray Buechner