Mail and Internet
Some of us use our systems for little more than keeping in touch with the outside world. Freeware can help smooth out the bumps in your ride through the e-ways.
Keep spam at bay. Bayesian spam filters are all the rage these days with their ability to calculate the spam probability of mail. One such tool is Michael Kramer's Spamihilator, which sits quietly in your taskbar tray, intercepting all incoming mail before it gets to your e-mail client (Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla, and pretty much any POP3 application). The product has its own "Recycle Bin" from which you can retrieve mails that are filtered by mistake, and a training area to help it learn what not to filter in the future. You can also specify friends never to filter, bad guys to always block, and what kinds of attachments (if any) to permit.
Download Spamihilator.
Put some muscle into Internet Explorer.
Microsoft finally added tabs and other features to Internet Explorer, but to make it even more powerful, check out the free IE7Pro (by Daniel Fang and Chris Li). IE7Pro boasts a configurable ad blocker, mouse gestures (for scrolling, navigating, and more by right-dragging the mouse), tab management, crash recovery of your last-open tabs, dynamic spell checking of anything you type into a browser, options to save a Web page as an image file, the ability to open new tabs by dragging links, and more. In addition, IE7Pro includes a number of user scripts, such as one that adds a Download link to YouTube videos. Many features are available from a pop-up menu whose icon IE7Pro adds to IE's status bar, but you'll have to learn others from the user guide or by browsing the massive, multipanel Preferences dialog box.
Download IE7Pro.
Keep your surfing private. The privacy of your personal data and surfing habits is an important concern these days. This is especially true if you need to use a computer at a library, Internet café, or hotel business center. One way to ensure that privacy is to surf the Web using Arche Twist's OperaTor, a utility that includes (and simultaneously launches) the Opera browser, the Privoxy Web proxy (with advanced filters for guarding your privacy), and The Onion Router (a system for anonymous Internet communication). OperTor (and its components) need no installer and store no information in the Registry, which means you can run it from a USB flash drive. This makes it ideal for surfing at public computers.
Download OperaTor.
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