The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has asked Congress for the necessary authority required to fight Internet spam we all hate and fills our inbox everyday, according to the article "spam" now accounts for about half of all e-mail traffic... here's a good utility you might want to give a try, I use it on a daily basis to filter my incoming email.

In testimony before the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, FTC commissioners said they need the ability to secretly investigate those who send deceptive e-mail and more leeway to go after spammers who send their messages across international borders.

E-mail marketers should be required to describe their products honestly and honor consumer requests to be taken off their contact lists, the commissioners said, while criminal penalties should be explored for those who falsify their return addresses.

Like I posted in another thread about spam, all retailers, organizations, etc, with online presence should not be allowed to sell, or distribute for free (if they are oh so altruistic), email addresses of customers/members.

Call me extreme, but I do not care if yet another lolita wants to describe her insides to me with honesty. I don't even want to receive such emails in the bloody first place, much less have to send them messages telling them to strike me off their list.

And, spambots that crawl the web looking for email addresses should be banned. Period. And hopefully, search engines should be designed so that email addresses do not show up on search results.

BTW, Julio, I will check out Mail Washer. Thanks for the heads up. (Wish the Pro version will work with other webmails besides Hotmail though!)

I have also heard good things about this one:
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/

Though I haven't tried it myself.

Cool! I will check that out too. There's more links to reviews and mentions on their index page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/popfile/

and here:
http://sourceforge.net/docman/displa...group_id=63137

Email Utopia will not be established by the government. Every day the government delivers about a pound of junk mail to my door. About half of it is on shiny paper that cannot be recycled. Sorting through this junk to recycle what I can takes me about a minute a day. I spend longer getting rid of my snail mail spam than I do getting rid of my email spam. The private sector--commercial and volunteer--will solve the spam problem. Government will make it worse.