Random words
I can understand how spam filter software gets fooled by deliberately misspelled words such as V1agra and so on, but what is the point of including a thesaurus full of unusual words? I receive a large number of emails like this and they are never identified as spam by my anti-spam software. David Bradbury

Jack Schofield replies : And that is your answer: it is an attempt to get past spam-blockers. Programs that use Bayesian analysis examine each message to see whether the content is likely to be spam, and their performance improves as they are "trained" on the sort of email you generally receive. The key words in spam email soon become obvious. The spammer hopes that including a random selection of rare words will make the email look more legitimate. It may also tend to degrade your spam blocking filter by associating a lot of usually welcome words (toil, chuckle, solicitous, quaint etc) with spam.

Also, if random words are added to each email, then each one is different. Some blocking systems could find it harder to stop a million spams that appear to be different than a million that are all exactly the same. Still, at least people who use these techniques know they are spammers and can't pretend that they are trying to send legitimate email. It would be good to see this tacit admission of guilt reflected in steep fines.

Email sorted
The list of messages in my Outlook Express Inbox shows "From" (the person writing to me). If I reply to it, with a copy of the original, then file my reply in an appropriate folder, it is no help to see that they all came from me! How can I force OE to display who these messages were "To"? Michael Slater

JS: By default, only the Sent folder shows emails by the To field, but you can change this. Go to one of the folders you have created and find the row of column headers such as From and Subject. Right-click on the headers and select Columns. This will bring up a box that lets you choose which columns you want displayed, including Priority and Size. (It also lets you set column widths.) Untick the check-box next to From, tick the box next to To, and then click OK. Now the folder will show who the messages were sent to, not who they are from. The column for To will be in the wrong place, of course, but you can fix that by "drag and drop". Simply click on the header for the To column and, holding down the mouse button, move it to the position you want.

Dialler attack
I clicked on a link which disconnected me from my ISP and dialled a premium rate number, though I was able to disconnect the modem cable from the wall during the handshake process. Digging around, I found that the link had taken me to a page with a Java applet on it, which I think installed the dialler, web.exe, in my root directory. The implications of this are very worrying. Through this method, couldn't a virus or Trojan be installed simply by clicking on a link? I'm running Internet Explorer 6 in Windows 98.

JS : True, and something similar happened to me, though the program could not dial out, because my PC is connected via ADSL. The answer was that I had missed a Microsoft update that fixed a security hole in its Java software. Some diallers such as IEDial can also be installed without notice - so-called drive-by installations - by exploiting a security hole in ActiveX, so you must also update IE6 to at least Service Pack 1 level. See Doxdesk and Unwanted Links for information about these parasites. I also use SpyWareGuard as a background program.

Sounds better
I want to take a sample from a music CD track and use it as my Windows start-up sound. The bit I had in mind is: "My daddy said 'Son, you're gonna drive me to drinking, if you don't stop driving that hot-rod Lincoln'," from Hot Rod Lincoln by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. Iain Noble

JS : Just grab a WAV file and put it in the C:\Windows\Media directory. Go to Start|Settings|Control Panel and select Sounds & Multimedia. Scroll down the list of Sound Events and select Start Windows. Click the Browse button and select your .wav file, then click OK. In Windows XP, switch to Classic View in the Control Panel window, double-click Sounds and Audio Devices, and select the Sounds tab. A long time ago, my PC used to say "Thank you for turning me on." You can download snappy lines for a wide variety of events from www.eventsounds.com/startup.htm.

Backchat

· Maxine Linnell wanted to keep her address book if she left AOL. Graham Guest says she can convert her AOL database by using Address Magic software from www.connectedsw.com/PersonalEdition.html.