Inbox:Spam e-mail is the bane of all our lives. It affects everyone from busy business people to the elderly who often have no idea how to banish it. It's enough to put anyone off using the internet, but unfortunately it just takes one gullible person to respond and the spammers can justify their daily annoyance, writes Mike Butcher

An estimated 60 billion spam e- mails are sent every day, up from 30 billion in 2006. Increasingly it is from spammers sending images instead of text, making it harder for PCs to identify.

So what's to be done? There are three main things to remember about spam: never open the e-mail (so disable previews), never reply or unsubscribe and switch on your junk mail filter if you have one.

An additional strategy is to use a combination of attacks, from filtering out common spam words, creating lists to identify good and bad e-mails, allowing your PC to connect to online databases of known spammers and programs which can "learn" what spam is and filter it out.

SpamAssassin (spamassassin. apache.org/) is a free open- source program which won't delete spam but instead inserts "spam markers" in the heading of junk e-mails which can be used to filter your e-mail. It uses several hundred tests to weed out the rubbish and scores them accordingly. With no training it should identify 85 per cent of spam and about 95 per cent after you have told it what you consider to be spam.

You can set it up on a Windows PC and use a plug-in for Outlook, but the free SpamIntelligence (see APMint. com) is the better way of integrating it. The commercially available SpamArrow (SpamArrow. com) is on sale for about €20.

An alternative to SpamAssassin is the free SpamAware (see Jam- Software. com) which works with Outlook and Outlook Express. This simply tags incoming spam e-mail with "SPAM" and lets you do the filtering later.

If you are on Outlook Express you may be better off switching e-mail programs to Mozilla Thunderbird (mozilla.com/ thunderbird) which is also free but offers far more elegant spam-fighting features.

If you don't want to download spam at all, then buy the affordable software from MailWasher.net. But be warned - you have to train it extensively about what is spam. This was acceptable a few years ago, but can be quite time-consuming now there is so much spam around.

POPfile (popfile.sourceforge. net) not only acts as a spam manager but also identifies messages on different subjects, not just senders. However, you will again have to train it, using up to 500 messages, for it to start recognising spam effectively, so either do it all in one go or e-mail by e-mail.

Then there are subscription services such as SpamArrest.com (€32 a year) and Spamfighter.com, with its pro version costing €24 a year. These typically act as an online gateway creating good and bad lists, so that eventually the only e-mail you actually download is genuine.

If you want to start fighting spam immediately then consider SpamIntelligence, SpamFighter Pro or try Mozilla Thunderbird. If you have a new PC with Windows Vista, then Windows Mail has some good tools.