Once it used to be a minor annoyance, but now there’s more of it than anything else: spam is clogging inboxes around the world.

With some estimates suggesting that four out of five emails contain unsolicited adverts, the problem’s bad enough to make some people consider giving up email altogether.

But you don’t have to start each day wading through a pile of share tips and crooked lawyers offering amazing legacies. With a little work you can bring email back under control.

Spam, spam, spam
Spam – unsolicited bulk email – is a nuisance. Most email messages sent over the internet are junk and often it feels like most of them end up in your inbox. The problem can be especially bad for people with a domain name of their own and a ‘catch-all’ mailbox – one where any name before the @ symbol is valid and is directed to your inbox.

In tests by Computeractive’s sister magazine PCW, spammers sent emails to a test account with more than 1,200 random variations on the name ‘Nigel’ in a single 24-hour period. The spammers tried to send mail to nigelxhya, nigelabdf and so on, as well as trying more obvious names like ‘president’, ‘ceo’, ‘info’ and ‘accounts’ before the @ symbol. That’s a lot of junk – and even without a catch-all address, there can still be plenty to wade through.

If an address has ever appeared on a web page, a newsgroup message or anywhere else online, chances are it’s been harvested and is on a spammers list. It’s even possible that it will turn up on lists that legitimate companies believe contain only people who’ve given their permission to receive marketing email.

Filtering out bad mail
So, what can be done to solve the problem? The best solution is for internet service providers (ISPs) to filter junk email, but short of changing your email address or ISP, there’s no easy way to make that happen.

The next best thing is to make sure that whatever email is downloaded from your mailbox, the only messages you see are the ones that you want. One of the best ways to do that is by creating black lists and white lists.

A black list is simply a list of email addresses (or parts of them, such as .biz) from which mail isn’t wanted, while a white list is the reverse.

A white list might contain friends, family, the email address from which the bank sends messages, and so on. Anything on the white list is kept and perhaps put in a special place where it can be seen right away, while anything in the black list is deleted and anything else is questionable.

Specialist programs such as Mailwasher can filter messages using black and white lists – and they can even use dynamic blacklists that are updated regularly over the internet with details of senders of recent spam.

But it’s possible to create white lists using the built-in rules in most email programs, even Outlook Express.