How to Kick Out the Trash

Finally, there's a community project that attacks spam the way Hollywood used to attack suspected communists: with a blacklist. For $4.99 a month, SpamNet www.cloudmark.com) checks your incoming mail against its own ever expanding database. The service's 475,000-plus members contribute by "voting" on what's spam and what isn't, using the BLOCK and UNBLOCK buttons that the SpamNet program adds to your Outlook task bar. Enough votes from individual members and a message is blocked for all. With thousands of reports coming in every second, it can be pretty effective.

If some spam gets through — as some inevitably will — you can always go back to filtering it the old-fashioned way: by hitting the delete key.