Spam almost changed my computer's life.

Well actually it almost changed how I work with my computer. And that change came about gradually which made the realization harder to identify.

You see, I used to get a few hundred pieces of spam a day. Now I realize that amount of spam would be staggering for most but for me, it's just part of the job.

As a newspaper columnist and radio talk show host, I get a large amount of unsolicited e-mail from public relations firms and independent sources pitching me with all kinds of products and services with the hope that I will write or talk about them. But as the years went by using the same e-mail address along with the increase of spam on the Internet, the hundreds of spams a day slowly grew into the thousands. As of today, I get around 14,000 spam messages a day and there's no end of it in sight.

With that amount of junk e-mail a day, my way of dealing with it caused some changes, including how I managed my computer. For example, I used to turn off my computer at the end of the day. Now I have to leave it on all the time because when I turned it off, the process of downloading the thousands of e-mails that accrued during the night took nearly an hour. And by the time that hour of downloading finished, so much more spam had been received by the server that another half-hour or so was needed to download that batch of several thousand.

When that finished, more time was needed to retrieve the next batch of spam, and so on. Eventually, I'd catch up with the process of downloading which took over two hours, and then I had to sift through them, which took even more time. It was just a mess and I had to do something about it.

Don't think that I didn't already have junk e-mail filters in place; of course I did. But the junk filters that come with mail programs just aren't up to the job when the numbers are so big. I needed something else.

Until recently, there was nothing in sight. I couldn't use challenge-response systems, which ask senders to verify themselves by responding to a text image. Too many were simply refusing to be bothered with the additional burden and I was missing out. White lists were no good for me because so many e-mails come to me unsolicited. I can't white list someone I don't know. What I needed was some kind of super junk e-mail filter that would somehow know what was bad and good. They exist and they all use something called Bayesian filtering.

Bayesian spam filtering is a type of statistical analysis that calculates the probability of an e-mail being spam based upon its contents. But the heart of what makes this really work is the person using it. As e-mail comes in, you train the filter by telling it what is and isn't spam. The more you train it, the better its accuracy becomes in identifying junk e-mail.

The one I use on my Macintosh is SpamSieve. It takes about 300 or so e-mails to effectively train the filter, which in my case was a cakewalk. In just a few short days, the accuracy became so good that SpamSieve's accuracy in detecting spam on my computer is now at about 99.8 percent. Now have my computer back.

Well, almost. I still have to download everything so I still have to keep my computer on all the time, but in the morning I see only my real e-mail. It's a thing of beauty.

The other thing I like about SpamSieve is that if integrates with all of the popular e-mail programs like Apple Mail and Entourage. If you decide to change mail clients later, you don't have to retrain SpamSieve; it can apply the same statistics it's accrued to the different e-mail applications. I went from using Apple Mail back to Entourage and SpamSieve didn't skip a beat. I still had all the filtering in place.

So if spam has you down, I suggest you try an e-mail filter that uses Bayesian filtering. On the Mac, SpamSieve is my recommendation, as it offers additional features such as address book integration. There are several filters that use Bayesian filtering available for Windows and can be found with a simple Google search. But no matter which one you decide to use, you can be sure that your spam problem will be greatly reduced if not completely eliminated.