From the letters that have appeared in Computeractive, we don't need to remind you that spam is a growing phenomena. There are plenty of junk-mail prevention programs, including Webroot Spam Shredder, which helps to protect you from the inconvenience and the unsavoury nature of spam.

Spam Shredder only works with POP3 email, which is the type of email account you get from your ISP. Web-based email services like Hotmail are not supported. As a result, Spam Shredder works best with Outlook, Outlook Express and Eudora and will automatically set itself up to work with these programs. You can use alternatives such as Incredimail, but you'll have to fiddle with some tricky settings if you do.

Either way, Spam Shredder will check every email before it reaches your inbox using the traditional tools of a whitelist and a blacklist. The former is a list of email addresses that you always want to receive mail from. You can add these individually or import them from an Outlook address book.

The blacklist is a list of email addresses you want blocked. Spam Shredder will check each mail for suggestions it could be junk, such as obscenities or buzzwords like 'viagra', and quarantine anything suspicious. It will also check its own database and quarantine material from known spammers.

Inevitably, a tiny proportion of legitimate mails will end up in the wrong place, but you can easily retrieve them. As for the rest, Spam Shredder will add every message deleted from the quarantine folder to its blacklist database.

In testing we found that Spam Shredder needed about a week to 'learn' to identify spam. However, with every junk email deleted, the service improved.

It will slow down email retreival, as it scans and checks all incoming mail, and it's not an immediate solution to spam. But persevere and Spam Shredder will reduce junk-mail drastically.

Contact: Softwide 0845 644 8268
www.webroot.com