There are ways to can spam. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. If you think the problem with junk email is getting worse... .you aren't alone. While it is difficult to eliminate the problem entirely, there are filters and software tools you can use to reduce the amount of junk that gets through. McAfee.com is selling a product it calls Spamkiller. Product manager Brison Gordon...

"What we've found is that not only is Spam increasing in great numbers, I mean to the point where analysts predict that we're going to have seven hundred and fifty billion pieces of spam in 2002, but one of the trends that we've been noticing at McAfee.com is that spam is becoming more of a security threat than a mere annoyance."

With scams spread by spam proliferating. McAfee's 30 dollar Spamkiller program intercepts incoming messages before they get to your email program...

"What Spamkiller does is it starts with thousands of these pre-installed filters and Spamkiller can filter on things like the sender, the subject, message text, full header and in addition to that, you can actually go in and filter by country code. If you don't want to receive email from Bolivia, you can filter out all email from Bolivia."

While Spamkiller does help... there are other programs you can try for free. MailWasher.net offers its software as a free download. It takes donations of between 3 and 30 dollars for registration. If you use a recent version of Microsoft's Outlook... a company called Cloudmark offers SpamNet free to individual users. It relies on users to report junk emailers... .banding together to keep the filter database up to date. It's chief technology officer was one of the co-founders of Napster. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.