The theme of this week's column is e-mail, how to control it, get rid of it and get on with your life. G-Lock's free SpamCombat 1.51 is a great alternative to paying for regular spam filtering software. SpamCombat removes spam e-mails without pulling them down into your Inbox.

Three different “filters” or tests are used to weed out offending e-mails, which now make up about 60 percent of my e-mail. You decide on how to apply the filters.

The HTML filter checks any HTML tags in the e-mail for validity. A DNSBL filter compares the sender's IP addresses against lists of known spam databases using public blacklists (also called DNSBL lists). The Bayesian filter analyses the message content and calculates if it is likely to be spam.

Since so many messages that I've sent to others have never been answered because they have been dumped by corporate spam filters, I really am not a believer in Spam programs. But you may find it useful. PP MailCheck by PPsoft.dk is also free and allows you to organise and control e-mails waiting on a POP3 server (normal dial up connection). The software allows you to preview the e-mails on the server and directly read, delete or reply to them without actually downloading them to your harddrive. A popup function not only tells you that you have mail, but also the sender and subject of the mail. MailCheck also comes with a programmable spam filter. MailCheck can also copy itself to a floppy disk so you can run it to check your mail on another computer.

Try OutBack Plus 4.1 by AJSystems.com Inc. if you are a Microsoft Outlook user. OutBack helps protect your Outlook data (e-mail messages, contacts, tasks, email accounts, signatures, message rules) by backing up the information. The backup file is saved as a compressed, password protected file.

This is much better than what I used to do, which is to go into the system folders of Outlook and make copies of the files there, in case my computer crashed.

The software costs $29.95, but you can download a trial copy that's good for 15 days. AJSystems.com has also released Express Assist 7.0.10 (cost $34.95), which is aimed at Outlook Express users.

The program allows you to search for and view messages in the backup without restoring, find and view messages in the backup not currently in Outlook Express and restore lost messages without losing the current mail folders. All the above software can be downloaded directly from the companies or from http://shareware.pcmag.com.

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Isn't competition great? A few months after Google announced it would soon launch a free e-mail service with 1 gigabite of space, all the other services are falling over themselves to realign themselves to the new market. Last week I was informed by Yahoo! that I had been boosted to 100Mb of space from my normal 10Mb. While it's still 10 times less than Google's offering, Yahoo!'s increase in space is welcome, especially since I resisted signing up for their paid e-mail service for the past two years. Pity the suckers who did.

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If you're a typical small business owner and cannot afford the price e-mail encryption and protection programs then you should be a Hushmail user. Hushmail offers a paid service, but there's also a free e-mail service, document storage and instant messaging service for small businesses.

I've been a user for the past three years. This month Hushmail announced it had added a new feature that allows users to upload files of up to 20 megabytes to their Hushmail accounts and choose to allow other users to access them. It's called secure file sharing. The service also allows other users to upload and delete files. The free service is available with two megabytes of storage space. Additional storage is available for a fee. Go to www.hushmail.com for more information.

Contact Ahmed at editor@offshoreon.com . Go to www.SecureBermuda.com for the latest security updates.