The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Degunking Email, Spam, and Viruses Major Keary

Like 'spam', the term, 'gunk' originated in the name of a product - in this instance, an industrial detergent marketed in the early 1930s. Gunk has since come to mean "unpleasantly sticky or messy matter" [Concise Oxford Dictionary]. Another term that has come into fashion is malware, which derives somehow from malicious code, a term used in professional level texts to encompass viruses, Trojans, worms, adware, spyware, and any other variants.

Degunking Your Email, Spam, and Viruses, a recent addition to the spam-cum-malware literature, is a practical tutorial pitched at people who get their e-mail on Windows-based systems.

The purpose of the book is to show readers how to degunk e-mail and viruses. It offers a number of programs (in the sense of an ordered list of actions) that take varying periods of time, from fifteen minutes to half a day. There is also a twelve-step program that lays out in broad terms what has to be done and in what order. There are separate programs for degunking e-mail and malware. I am not sure that one would want to clean the gunk from viruses; total elimination is more like it, and that's what the book shows you. Readers are taken through an Aladdin's cave of step-by-step instructions for degunking, explanations of the mysteries of spam filtering, and wonderful advice on how to fend off the villains.

The style is breezy, but not patronising. About a third of the book is about e-mail strategies. The discussions are wide ranging and present a number on interesting ways to handle e-mail more effectively. Anyone running courses for Internet and e-mail novices should find this part of the book well worth close study.

A feature worth noting is the descriptions of various applications and a rating table of e-mail clients. The products named don't represent an exhaustive list, but provide a useful guide. I was pleased to see Pegasus Mail among the e-mail clients - my personal experience is that it offers powerful filtering facilities, is easy to use, and it's free. Another product described in some depth is POPFile, a filtering application that uses
Bayesian techniques. Bayesian methods can be very effective and this is the best discussion of practical application for lay readers that I have seen.

POPFile is not to be confused with POPTray, an e-mail notifier, that is also described amongst a wide range of applications (with source URLs and installation tips) for countering spam, viruses, pop-ups, and spyware.

Throughout the text are boxed items that contain special warnings, interesting information, and useful advice. Apart from the comprehensive information in the book itself, there are frequent references to URLs where more detailed documentation can be found.

A small piece of advice worth repeating is, if your system seems to be ailing don't discount the possibility of hardware problems. For example, regular instances of the blue screen of death can be a sign of a hard disk heading for heart failure; reformatting and overusing utilities such as scandisk can seriously jeopardise the chances of data recovery.

This book is recommended to users who want solutions rather than in-depth technical explanations, who want how-to information about cleaning up their respective systems, advice on maintaining a regimen for countering spam and avoiding malware, and who want to be informed of the current state of the spam/malware problem. It does those thing very well. Highly recommended.

Jeff Duntemann: Degunking Your Email, Spam, and Viruses ISBN 1-93211193-X Published by Paraglyph Press, 334 pp., RRP $39.95 incl. GST