WASHINGTON, 14 October 2003 — Use the Internet and e-mail long enough and, knowingly or not, you’ll develop a long list of timesaving features you’d like to see.

There should be an easy way to back up your e-mail messages, for example, and a way to get rid of if not outlaw spam.

Something to make the proliferation of browser windows go away would be nice, as well, you might say. While today no one tool can satisfy all your needs, some nifty utilities do exist that come close.

Take E-mail Saver (http: www.amicgames.com show.php?v=emailsaverxe), for example. If you’re like many people, you probably find it necessary to keep old e-mail messages, whether for personal or business reasons. But what would happen if, due to a system crash or some other catastrophe, you lost all of your e-mail?

Many of us would not like to face that thought. And yet few e-mail programs provide a backup capability of any kind. That’s why you need an e-mail backup tool in your software arsenal, and that’s where E- mail Saver comes in. This little tool, which will recognize the e- mail databases of just about every popular e-mail program on the market today, will make short work of backing up your precious messages to another drive or directory for safekeeping.

Hopefully you won’t be backing up spam - those unwanted messages everyone is getting these days. Lots of companies have made an attempt to create software to deal with the problem of spam, but few have succeeded.

One of the best anti-spam programs thus far is Firetrust’s MailWasher Pro (www.firetrust.com). Available in a trial and a full version, MailWasher Pro distinguishes itself from other spam-fighting software in its ability to detect spam initially and to learn from you as you tell the program which e-mail messages are unsolicited and unwanted.

MailWasher Pro configures itself easily with your existing e-mail accounts and, once configured, the program can check your e-mail for you, notify you when messages arise, and automatically select and or delete messages that have been verified to be spam. How does the program verify spam? In two

ways. First, MailWasher checks with a database of known spammers, and second, MailWasher keeps track of senders and types of messages that you have identified as being spam.

Within a few days of using MailWasher, you’ll notice that you get fewer unwanted e-mail messages in general and that the ones you do get are easier to get rid of. Everything that either you or MailWasher identifies as spam, is bounced back to the sender as an undeliverable message. With luck, spammers keep a database of unusable addresses, and will take you off of their list.

Internet browser windows themselves can sometimes seem like spam — and in fact they sometimes are, in the form of advertisements. Two new programs can help in the fight against browser proliferation.

One is Zero Popup 3.5, an unobtrusive little tool that sits in your taskbar and does nothing but get rid of pop-up browser windows displaying ads. Once you use this tool, you’ll probably not want to be without it while surfing the Internet.

Yes, sometimes Zero Popup can block legitimate browser windows spawned by, for example, shopping sites or other sites where you click a link and some information is displayed in a new window. Thankfully, it’s easy to temporarily turn off Zero Popup’s pop-up blocking capability — and turn it back on again.

Most people these days use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for surfing the Internet. While it’s a fine when browser, it has at least one annoying habit: every time you open a new window, a new instance of the Web browser opens. The result is that soon, multiple browser icons populate your taskbar, and it becomes difficult to discern which browser holds the content you want to view again.

Netcaptor comes to the rescue. Not a browser in its own right, Netcaptor adds tabbing functionality to Internet Explorer. With Netcaptor installed, Internet Explorer no longer spawns new windows.

You can open multiple pages with Netcaptor at once, and the tabs of Netcaptor will provide a status of how quickly each page is loading, so you don’t have to click on a tab until the page is ready to read. For people who spend a lot of time on the Internet, frequently visiting several sites at once and keeping multiple browser windows open, Netcaptor can be a huge timesaver. The program even includes its own built-in pop-up blocker.

You can try out Netcaptor for free by downloading a copy at http: www.netcaptor.com. The full version costs just under $30.