The bad news: a new report from the European Network and Information Security Agency says that almost 96% of all e-mails is now spam.

The good news: Spamihilator is claimed by its authors to remove more than 98% of spam before it gets into your inbox. We're not sure that everyone will see that level of decrease, but there's no doubt that Spamihilator is packed with technology to help you keep the tide of junk at bay.

The initial configuration process is easier than we expected. The setup wizard launched, detected our copy of Outlook 2007 and configured it to use Spamihilator in just a few seconds (and it'll do the same with Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Eudora and many other email programs).

The program then uses Bayesian filters to calculate the probability of a particular email being spam. You can enhance these results further by training the program, helping it identify spam it's missed. A Link filter scans incoming emails for links to known spam websites, the DCC-Filter uses the scan data from millions of email uses to identify junk mails, and you can improve performance even more by installing some very useful free plugins. http://www.spamihilator.com/plugins

We've no doubt that all these features can, over time, block a significant amount of spam, but initially at least they'll trap other emails, too. The very first message scanned from our system was legitimate, yet Spamihilator assessed it as having a 100% probability of being spam. We restored this in a few clicks, but it does show that, like any other spam filter, you need to keep an eye on Spamihilator to confirm it's not blocking anything important.