Blocking software worked in Maine: after a record 320 emails, including eight actual letters, something had to change.

E-mail pulsed into the Bangor Daily News five years ago, our new untiring clerk, our eternally busy footman.

Here, for once, was technology that would make work easier rather than the usual trick of simultaneously allowing and demanding that more work be done. E-mail would be different, an obvious blessing to small editorial staffs. Fewer letters to retype. Relief from lousy handwriting. Contacting writers a mere reply key away. Happiness, or at least some newspaperly approximation of it.

But you know what happened next. We didn't get only letters in our letters box. People used our address as a backwoods landfill, depositing the unsought and the unclean. Pornographers and politicians, sham doctors and legal shysters dumped their wink-wink confidences and enormous boasts, their miracle cures and daily once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, and our e-mail count rose from 20 a day to 40 to 80 to 100 and up and up. One unfortunate day, a record 320 e-mails, including eight actual letters.

I watched most of this secondhand. Our e-mail arrived in my assistant's computer, and he seemed unbothered by the ever-accumulating total. Occasionally, he would comment on his luck of having an African prince offer to share a royal fortune with him if only he'd send along his bank account number. Otherwise, he would spend an hour or more each morning sifting through the mail and tapping his delete key, noting only when an untoward number of offers for penis enlargement arrived.

All this changed when my assistant shined his shoes, combed his hair, and took a job elsewhere. His replacement and now my editorial writing colleague at the News, Susan Young, had spent perhaps a week trying to extract the letters from the sludge of the inbox when she said, sensibly: "Killing junk mail is really not a good use of my time. There probably are ways to block the 'spam'" Probably, I thought, and put it on my list of things to do, which is to say I forgot about it.

A week went by. Susan sent me a reminder and included an example of what she found each morning on her computer. It focused my attention.

Surely Maine has farms, and, naturally, farm laborers. But what with the black flies around here, our farmhands wear clothes. Moreover, I've yet to see them contort their faces into pretend moans when handling livestock, as the naked-but-for-their-hats women did in the picture Susan had helpfully passed my way.

Where was PETA when you needed it? I sat at Susan's computer, looking for a simple way to kill the piles of unwanted mail. But too many letters were mysterious until opened, and the process was slow.

After 15 minutes, I concluded three things: Other newspapers must encounter this; they've probably solved the problem; and the first person who can flatten certain body parts and inflate others while also providing a low mortgage rate will make a fortune.

"There probably are ways to block the spam," I told Susan confidently.

I went to our computer systems guys. "Everybody with a public e-mail address has this problem" one told me. "Costs $20,000 for the blocking software, and even that might not work." Not good.

I posted a query on the NCEW listserv. Excellent--several responses, all useful. No one was sure the problem was permanently solvable but several found relief with "spam" blockers. Placed on an individual computer rather than installed systemwide, the price dropped to about $40. I returned to our computer systems guys, who said they would try it. I mentally noted that I had just saved the newspaper $19,960 and would expect a nice thank-you note presently.

We installed McAfee SpamKiller a few days before Consumer Reports came out with a review of "spam" blockers that rated McAfee in the mediocre range. But it has worked well enough for us during the past month to call it a success. It was simple to install, and Susan says it catches 80 to 90 percent of the "spam" including all the truly awful ones, while incorrectly blocking about five percent of real letters.

The program allows a user to review what has been blocked so retrieving the few actual letters that get killed isn't difficult, nor is telling system not to block a specific address again. Consumer Reports rates the top "spam" blocker as SAProxy, from a place called Stata Labs (www.bloomba.com). The website says the software is free but the company wants $6.50 to maintain the site, which I suppose means the software costs $6.50.

The story line in most articles lamenting the spread of "spam" is that the spammers eventually figure out a way to get around the blockers. Given their ability to inflate the hopes of millions with promises of easy credit and knock-off Viagra, I don't doubt it.

But even if the blocking software must be replaced annually, it's still an inexpensive way to eliminate thousands of pieces of unwanted mail. At the News, Susan finds her job is faster and certainly more pleasant, and I find myself thinking less and less about farm-hands acting peculiarly around the barn.

Todd Benoit is editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News in Maine.E-mailtbenoit@ bangordailynews.net