I don't condone violence, but mention the word "spam" and you're asking for trouble. Obviously, it's not Spam musubi that bothers me, but the garbage that clogs your e-mail box with ads for Viagra, porn, diet pills, Nigerian get- rich-quick schemes and medications guaranteed to enhance the size of body parts.

I'm an expert on spam, primarily because I used to get more than 400 spam messages a day. No, I don't work with the purported Nigerians, rather, in the early days of the Internet, I made a crucial error in putting my e-mail address into the Internic, which is the main registry for domain names.

Spam is a sort of moving target that has spawned an endless battle between purveyors of junk mail and a growing antispam industry that is forever creating countermeasures to keep it out of your face. Sad to say, the good guys are not winning this war. Perhaps an indication of where things are going is a July 28, 2003, readers survey from InfoWorld that concluded that the "biggest technology hype" was antispam software.

I don't quite agree with that poll, but there's no question the antispam market is filled with products that are far from perfect. There are, however, many solutions that are both affordable and effective.

If you only have a single PC to protect, there are many decent antispam programs available, such as Spam Killer from McAfee. It costs about $40 and allows you to set up your own filters, which keep your friends in and the junk out. It's a bit time-consuming because every day you have to filter out new junk, but it does eliminate most of the garbage.

Remember, no matter how hard you try, some spam will evade your filters.

A new antispam technology, named challenge-response, creates a "white list" that opposes machine-generated spam by forcing correspondents to prove they exist. Thus, if someone mails you who is not on the white list, the software will respond with a message that asks the sender to type a number or word on a screen or answer a question to prove that they are flesh and blood. It's annoying sometimes to deal with these responses and, moreover, not always in your best interest. For example if you order a book from Amazon, you're going to get automated responses from a machine. If you use this type of antispam software, you'll be blocked from getting those messages.

Mailfrontier Matador (www.mailfrontier.com) is an example of a company that utilizes this type of technology, but allows you to turn the challenge-response system off. It also employs other methods to block junk and has been favorably reviewed in the trade press. At $30 it's a good deal.

Cloudmark Spamnet (www.cloudmark.com) has also gotten good reviews in computer magazines. Its technology is called "community based." It uses the power of public opinion (its end users) to decide what's junk and keeps a database so that if one person votes against a spammer, everyone benefits from it. Cost is $4 a month.

For businesses small or large, I recommend going with a managed service. Several companies provide such services, including Front Bridge (sold locally by Sprint as Sprint Email Protection Service), Postini, and Brightmail. Basically, these services get your mail before you do, check if it's spam (or virus-laden), and forward anything to you that it thinks is OK. Costs range from $2 to $4 a month for each mailbox.

We use services such as this for our in-house needs as well as our clients', and they are actually pretty impressive. In the few months we've used our service, my spam has gone from more than 400 a day to fewer than 10.

The bane of spam-filtering services is that sometimes they grab legitimate mail and treat it as spam. The better services will allow you to review all your mail it thinks is spam, to look for these "false positives."

And of course, the best services don't have any false positives.

Several local companies have gotten into the spam-killing business. One is the Honolulu-based ISP, LavaNet, which provides "Spammo", a free utility, that identifies, flags and/or deletes probable spam from any LavaNet account.

It's also free to LavaNet subscribers. Colleagues who have used it report that it works well. So well, in fact, that Lava has spun off a new company, Tiki Technologies, to market Spammo to businesses as a service, appliance or combination of the two.

[Editor's Note]: Customers of Oceanic Time Warner's Road Runner service have probably also experienced a drastic decrease in spam arriving in their hawaii.rr.com email accounts due to multiple filters being implemented at the national level.

Peter Kay, Hawaii's own serial tech entrepreneur, has also launched an antispam product called TitanKey, which is a variation on the challenge-response theme. According to his Web site, Kay states his solution is the only one that offers mailbox owners less spam the longer they use a particular e-mail address. According to an article from the Web site ISP Planet, he has created a proprietary technology that he maintains is superior to anything else on the market. I can't vouch for this, but give him credit for his bravado. Titan Key is being tested as a standard feature for Road Runner's Business Class service, but is currently only available for ISPs.

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