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you wouldn't be getting the spam in the first place.

One major problem with this is setting up an out of office message when you are on vacation. If there isn't some way of specifying who does or doesn't get the reply, then you will increase the spam threat. This can't be helped, but it does increase spam.

So what do you do? Simple. Just delete it. Trust me. Anything else is going to take you more time and be less effective. Want to do something anyway? Okay, we will take a brief look at filters. These are rules you set up in your email program that handle certain pieces of email. How this is done is different from system to system. We will use Outlook Express in the examples below. Your system may be different, but this should give you some guidance with which to get started.

In Outlook Express, you would click on Tools, then Message Rules. Here, you will set up the Condition, and the Action of the rule. In other words, on what mail do you run the rule, and what does it do. The bottom window is where you will give this rule a name. We'll do a couple of simple examples. First, let's say you get a spam from somebody@somewhere.com.

Highlig ht the message and click on the Message menu option. The simplest thing to do would be click on the Block Sender option. The problem with this is one of the many reasons that spam filters don't work. This email may come from somebody@somewhere.com. The next one will come from somebody1@somewhereelse.com, and so forth. But, there is little to lose, so go ahead and click on Block Sender.

But we want to actually create a rule for this message, so open the Message menu back up and click on Create Rule From Message This will open up a New Mail Rule window with one option already selected. In the top window, Where the From line contains people, is already checked and the sender is filled in the third window. If you checked Delete It in the second window, you will be doing the same thing as blocking the sender.

So instead, uncheck the box in the first window and check the Where the Subject line option. Notice this changes the verbiage in window three. In the second window, rather than delete it, check the option to Move it to the specified folder. We don't want to start deleting messages until we are sure of what we are doing.

Now in the third window, we have to specify what we are moving. Click on the blue link that says, contains specific words to bring up another window. Now in the top box, type in words from the subject line of the email

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