Yahoo spam
I have been happily using Yahoo email for ages, and the spam has (mostly) filtered neatly into the Bulk mail folder. This week, I have been swamped by spam, which has sneaked into my Inbox at a terrifying rate, and this necessitates laborious individual deletion. David Pugh

Jack Schofield replies: With web-based mail services, you have direct access to your mailbox so there is no simple way to filter it before or during the download, as there is with POP3 mail clients such as Outlook Express, Thunderbird and The Bat! My workaround is to create a new folder called Realmail and move things that are not spam to that folder. Go to Yahoo's Mail Options section and look under General Preferences: this lets you set the number of messages displayed on each page between 10 and 200. If you display 100 at a time, you can tick the box in the header (next to Sender) to select them all, then click Delete to delete them all at once. The same approach works with Hotmail and other web-based services. However, if you decide to collect mail using a POP3 program, I'd recommend Mailwasher or SpamPal or both.

Just checking
How would I find out whether I have a keystroke logger on my PC? Mani B

JS: There is no foolproof approach, but the popular anti-virus and anti-Trojan programs will find the common keyloggers that are sometimes dropped by viruses. If you are more suspicious, there's Pest Patrol, which is good, and Anti-Keylogger, which I have not tried. However, a keylogger will probably record keystrokes in some kind of file, and it may be possible to detect this.

For example, disconnect your PC from the internet, clear out all temporary files, reboot and leave it running overnight. In the morning, create and save a few large text files in Notepad (or simple text editor), then search the whole drive for files created or modified in the past hour. Make sure the search includes system and/or hidden files, and double check the folders that hold temporary files. If there are any files you do not recognise, see what they contain and what created them.

Stop it
I have two anti-spyware programs, an anti-spam program plus an anti-virus program. Do I need a firewall program? David Gardner

JS: Absolutely! A firewall is needed to block things such as internet worms (Blaster etc), keep out would-be hackers, and block communications from rogue programs and Trojans that have not been detected by your other programs. There are free PC firewalls for personal use available from Sygate, Kerio and Zone Labs (Zone Alarm).

Wrong country
I am based in England and use Eclipse as my ISP, but periodically Internet Explorer 6 seems to think I am in Germany and gives me the German Google page. I just want to stick to the English version. Thomas Haworth

JS: Some sites use the language setting in Internet Explorer, which you can find by going to Tools|Internet Options|General and clicking the Languages button at the bottom. However, Google uses the nationality of the IP (Internet Protocol) address, and does not always get it correct. Clicking the "Go to Google.com" link at the bottom of the Google page should take you to the US version, or you can try setting www.google.co.uk as your default home page. Otherwise, try using www.google.com/ncr or www.google.co.uk/ncr (for "no country redirection"). If all else fails, www.google.com/intl/en should always bring up an English language version of Google.

Backchat

· Several readers paid for Enigma SpyHunter with no hyphen) when they should have been downloading the free SpyBot Search & Destroy with hyphen). You could try asking for a refund, but it seems reasonable to use the program if you have paid for it. SpyHunter has been accused of producing "false positives", but since mal-ware programs often try to look like legitimate ones, they probably all do.

· Brian O'Shea was switching to Internet Explorer because of the number of sites that don't work properly with alternative browsers. Jason Boissiere from software giant Computer Associates says: "I use Mozilla and Firefox, and for both browsers the ieview plug-in adds a context menu item to 'Open this page in IE'. Very handy when you hit badly formatted sites." (see http://ieview.mozdev.org).

· Jim McAllister wanted a freeware or shareware program that would display digital photographs stored on a CD without having to install software. Paddy Gaunt says: "Because (as you say) some of the auto-run and HTML editing is tricky, we have developed a product that kind of does everything for you." See: www.conference-cd.com. It's not free. Simon Pugh adds: "Slides! is a great free slide viewer for the Mac and has been updated to work on OS 10.3.3." Go to http://richardk.info/slides.