• Product: InBoxer for Outlook
• Direct Price: $24.95
• Requires: Microsoft Outlook 2000 or later
• Company Info: Audiotrieve LLC, 617-499-7700, www.audiotrieve.com

There's more than one way to skin a spammer. To spot spam, Audiotrieve's InBoxer for Outlook enlists some of the same language recognition technologies that the company has used to filter information from audio and video streams. InBoxer isn't a cure-all, but it joins a short list of personal software packages that can filter most spam from your in-box with only a modicum of hassle.

Much like the Ella filtering utility from Open Field Software, which we recently tested, InBoxer integrates with Microsoft Outlook; you can't use the app with any other e-mail client. But if you're one of the millions who run Outlook, you'll find the tool much easier to use than standalone apps like DigiPortal's ChoiceMail One or NextGen's GoodbyeSpam.

InBoxer installs in minutes. Upon installation, it adds two new folders to your Outlook menu: InBoxer Blocked and InBoxer Review. Then, using the same mathematical models built into Audiotrieve's audio and video products, the app sifts through your in-box. Messages deemed spam are shuttled into the Blocked folder. Messages that, according to calculations, fall into the gray area between spam and legitimate mail are placed in the Review folder.

Considering that InBoxer goes through this initial process with absolutely no training, we found the outcome reasonably impressive. Before we tested the product at PC Magazine Labs, our in-box contained 200 legitimate messages and 100 pieces of spam. InBoxer correctly sorted 21 spam messages into the Blocked folder, and 18 of the 24 messages it placed in the Review folder were also spam.

Of course, that means that 61 spam messages were left in our in-box. But the utility learns your mail as you use it more. At installation, InBoxer also adds a pair of buttons to your Outlook toolbar: Block and Keep. Using these buttons, you can periodically parse through your mail and identify what sort of messages should be blocked and what should be kept. As you do so, the app adjusts its filters accordingly.

Initially, you'll have to look through your Blocked and Review folders as well as your in-box. Eventually, you'll check through the Review folder occasionally, looking for important mail that may have slipped through the filter. After a few days of training, InBoxer caught about 90 percent of incoming spam, with just a handful of what we deemed as legitimate mail winding up in the Review folder. InBoxer also includes a blacklist and a whitelist, plus several advanced tools for adjusting filters by hand.

The only trouble with InBoxer is that it's not quite as slick as Ella. Audiotrieve confuses matters by installing two Quarantine folders instead of one. But InBoxer is easier to use than many other personal antispam utilities, and it can certainly ease your spam problem.