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Kathleen Bullington, a retired educational grant director in Des Moines, used to let her two grandchildren use her computer when they came to visit. But now, because of Mrs. Bullington's concern about pornographic spam, she does not allow them near it. In fact, unless she is hovering over them, watching every click of the mouse, the machine is off limits.

She is so exasperated that she forwards every piece of spam she receives to the Federal Trade Commission and to the authorities at America Online. She does this even though she suspects that her diligence will have little effect.

Mrs. Bullington thought about changing her e-mail address, but she worries that people she wants to hear from will be unable to reach her if they do not know she has switched addresses. "If you change your e-mail address, you cut off your right arm, so to speak," she said.

For those who are caught in such a bind - unwilling to change the address but also reluctant to give it out when it is required for, say, online purchases - several Web sites have sprung up offering disposable e-mail addresses. For a small fee, a user has the option of turning off the disposable address when it is no longer needed or becomes inundated with spam. Spamex.com, Spamgourmet.com and Sneakemail.com are just a few of the disposable e-mail generators.

Ms. Garrelts said that in addition to restricting how often she gives out her e-mail address, she spends a lot of time "trying to backtrack and get off lists" in the hope of preventing spammers from getting her address. But in doing so, she said, she knows she runs the risk of getting on more lists. The obvious solution, she said, was simply to use e-mail less.

Marc Perdue, 45, a systems administrator at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has decided to cancel the e-mail account of his 12-year-old daughter, Kathryn, and start over again.

For Mr. Perdue, the final straw was when Kathryn recently typed the keyword "pussycat" into a search engine while searching for pictures of animals. The results she got were not what she expected. After she unwittingly pointed her browser to one of the links, she began receiving as many as 100 pieces of e-mail a week, with subject lines like "Leather, baby" or "Grandma's giving pleasure."

While Mr. Perdue does not know how (or if) the inadvertent Web visit led to the spam deluge, he concluded, "We can probably eliminate 90 percent of this by getting rid of her e-mail account and getting a new one." He said he tried to install a spam filtering program - as 37 percent of those in the Pew survey with personal e-mail accounts have done - but found that it created more problems by blocking access to a good deal of legitimate e-mail.

"I have not come up with a really good bulletproof method of preventing that stuff," Mr. Perdue said. "I can only kill the animal after it's come into the house. I can't close the door and keep it out."

Ted Schell, 59, of Manhattan, has devised a low-tech way to keep at least some spam at bay. Mr. Schell, until recently a general partner with Apax Partners, a private equity firm, now has two different business cards, one with his e-mail address and one without. Operating on the assumption that the more he puts his address out into the world, the more likely he is to receive spam, he hands out cards with his e-mail address only to certain people.

All others just get his phone number. "If people wanted to get a hold of me, they could call and I could deal with it when I really had time to do it," he said.

Dr. Fallows of Pew said, "I think what you're seeing in all these user attempts to work around spam is their own way to preserve and save e-mail because they value it so highly."

Vivian Ong of Auckland, New Zealand, who runs an online business selling computer hardware, has gone beyond working around spam. After spending too much time each day deleting junk e-mail, Ms. Ong, 22, said, she decided to fight back, "in what little way I could." She now devotes a few minutes each day to trying to stop spammers.

"Of course, this means clicking on the links in the spam e-mails," she said. But she is willing to risk still more bombardment in order to find the offenders.

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