MATADOR 1.0 MAILFRONTIER www.mailfrontier.com $29.95

Spam overload: Everyone suffers from it. Yet having employees delete nuisance E-mail one message at a time is an expensive, productivity-sapping way of handling the problem. And it's really annoying. A better approach is to fight back with an automated application to filter spam.

It costs companies about $26 a month per employee to deal with unwanted E-mail, Ferris Research estimates. For a one-time fee that's not much more than that, you can get MailFrontier Inc.'s spam-fighting software, Matador 1.0. The desktop application creates a so-called white list of E-mail addresses that it accepts (based on messages you've sent and names in your address book) and a black list of E-mail addresses that you've designated as bothersome. The latter get blocked from entering your in-box.

Matador uses a content filter based on statistical algorithms to identify whether a message contains inappropriate content based on the context of the message, which it then blocks. It's also capable of offering a "humanity challenge" to senders to determine if a message is from an actual person or from a machine that's indiscriminately bombarding systems. The challenge, for example, might ask a sender to identify how many items are pictured in a message. It's the kind of question that can only be answered by a person, says Brian Wilson, co-founder of MailFrontier. If answered convincingly, the message gets through.

Matador has the ability to recognize electronic newsletters or other E-mail subscriptions as acceptable messages. One downside is that it works only with Microsoft's Outlook client. Early next year, MailFrontier plans to release server software that IT departments can install to fight spam before it gets to desktops.--Tischelle George