I saw an article today that has reminded me of a post I've been wanting to make. It was written by Frank James of the Chicago Trib, (though I saw it in the Houston Comical) and it's about your and my favorite mystery meat, spam.

I give you the links, but the Trib wants you to register, and the Comical drops everything off into the payola archives too quickly for you to get to it.

All it really says is that spam is bad and getting worse, and you already knew that.

The pertinent quote: "In September of 2001, we measured that 8 percent of all Internet e-mail was spam," said Linda Smith Munyan, a spokeswoman for Brightmail, which provides companies with spam-blocking software. "For (2002), it was 40 percent."

Well, the first thing to note here is that stats from a company that makes anti-spam code is not exactly coming from the most objective source. But Frank mentions her interest - good for him. It is getting worse, though I'm not sure it's gone up 500% in a single year.

About six months or so ago, I started using Mailwasher, a spamblocker. I've been happy with it. It's flexible, easy to use, and best of all, free. You do have to look at a small banner in the freeversion, but you can register it for as little as three bucks. The author calls it a "tip." Twenty bucks gets you tech support and lifetime upgrades. It's so easy to use I can imagine anybody would need tech support, but...

I've not done much research into the alternatives. It was the first anti-spam software I tried, and I've liked it enough to not even go look at others.

I've been running version 1.32, a beta. Looking at the developer's website, the latest is 2.0.12b. Yikes! Guess I need to upgrade...