Thank you for your thoughtful reply. My email shield is already set (and has been) at the ‘high’ level. The firewall is at the default (medium risk) zone. I was under the impression that AIS also combated malware and such. The Avast news service link on the bottom of the Summary page states- Avast software Twenty years in pursuit of malware. At any rate, thank you for the recommendation of the Mailwasher program or similar. I use regular Outlook and not Outlook express to download my emails. This dial-up connection is currently connected at 26.4kbps so I obviously don’t do much surfing or internet browsing or most especially downloading. I will investigate the additional program but in the meantime if there are any other measures or settings that I ought to employ, please let me know. Today there were 1858 emails. Thank you.