As a result of that plus many years of being on the Internet yields a huge amount of SPAM (not the meat, but the unsolicited e-mails) and I can truthfully say I hate receiving it. I absolutely refuse to buy from it and won’t buy from any organization that uses it.

On a normal day I will receive about 120 e-mails and I would estimate that at least 80 are spam. This is also a great waste of my time and a danger to the computer in that many attempts to propagate virus laden files are sent by use of spam.

I tried to limit my exposure by using Netscape rather than Outlook since the largest amount of attacks are directed at Outlook and I use WordPerfect because it is less likely to be attacked than is Microsoft Word.

In spite of that I still get flooded with spam and that really irritates me. Then I discovered SpamKiller and things have picked up a bit.

Below is the basic screen that I use to abort the spammers' attempts to flood my inbox. During installation I can select some features and also identify mailboxes that I want to work with.

Marion did not like the initial use of SpamKiller because it zapped some of her messages that she wanted so I took her off the system by deselecting her account. I also had a lot of my messages identified as spam when I first put the program to work.

The secret of success is to have patience and to teach the system which mail has been misidentified as spam. This is done by going to the basic screen and simply selecting “rescue message”. When you do this the system will resend the message to you and you will be able to open it with your normal e-mail program.

If the program puts a message from an acceptable source in the kill area all you have to do is select “add a friend” from the list on the right side of the screen and that won’t happen again.

You can set up filters to block mail that you don’t want based on the senders e-mail address, the title of the message or even key words that you select. Just think, select “opt-in” and every spam that tells you that the company believes you asked for it somehow is automatically dumped.

Practical use of the program is simple and very safe for your computer because it never removes the messages from the e-mail server until you tell it to by activating your e-mail program. I can review the killed messages in SpamKiller and then do absolutely nothing and (based on my settings) in two days the messages are deleted and never hit my computer.

The messages are automatically run through the anti-virus program I have as further protection before they are ever removed from the server which is an added layer of virus prevention and I have had the number of virus attacks fall from an average of 3 per day to less than two per week.

I can “spoof” the spammers by sending them an “error” message to make them think that my e-mail address is not valid and I can also send either a canned or a personalized message of complaint to the ISP of the spammer — although I don’t see that doing much good since most of the addresses are fake anyhow.

The amount of spam I have received since I started using the program about 3 weeks ago has dramatically dropped and by screening the e-mail through the program has meant that I can almost forget about being asked to increase the size of various parts of my body or to buy pasta pots.

The program comes with a real printed manual which is well written and easy to follow. The only problem I had was that I missed the part where I had to enter my e-mail server address in order to send error and complaint messages but I found that out soon enough.

If you hate spam, go for this program — it will help you fight back and let you regain some control over the e-mail you want to receive.

SpamKiller can be ordered from CompUSA or from McAfee or by purchase on eBay. Prices range from $15 to $30 depending on sales at the various stores.