AOL ($23.90 per month) doesn't have a great reputation when it comes to spam, though it does try. The company keeps track of known spamming servers and blocks them, which it says eliminates about 20 percent of spam. You probably wouldn't know that by looking at the amount of spam in your account, though.

AOL marks all incoming mail as being either from People I Know, Bulk Senders, or Unknown Senders. If you consistently add to your address book bulk and unknown mailers from whom you want messages, you can effectively use the People I Know view as a spam-free view of mail. But you'll have to do a lot of training to get to the point where you no longer have to check your other views. To cut down further on junk mail, AOL's Mail Controls let us configure our mail to create various types of whitelists, such as only AOL users or only specified e-mail addresses.

New in Version 8.0, we could fink on a spammer to AOL with the Report Spam button on the message window. AOL gets almost 2 million spam referrals daily, which gives you an idea of how much spam gets through the systemwide filters. It uses the referrals to feed its own blacklist.

In the bigger picture, AOL argues that software can never be the whole solution to the problem, and the company lobbies for stronger laws to end some spamming techniques and hold spammers financially liable for misleading and dishonest tactics. Recently, the company was actually able to prosecute a spammer successfully, but we're less sanguine about trying to make a dent in spam through the nation's courtrooms.