Steven den Beste of USS Clueless just posted an entry about the tools he uses to control his internet browsing and spam email. I use K9 for email spam catching (based on an earlier recommendation from him). It works quite well for DW, who gets two orders of magnitude more spam than I do (she gets spam on the order of 10^4 since she cleared stats, I get it on the order of 10^2 since I cleared stats - both at roughly the same time). Because I get so little spam, though, K9 has some issues - it only catches around 25% of my incoming spam. Since I get maybe one or two leakers a day, it is not a big deal - DW gets the same number of leakers a week on a vastly larger email volume. And I could tune it via blacklist/whitelist rules to be better, but it'd be a large effort for marginal gains.

Don't let this dissuade you from getting it, though. It works most remarkably, especially since I don't mark every bit of commercial email spam (there are some vendors I like hearing from via email) so certain commercial keywords aren't getting flagged. And it works almost perfectly on sexually-themed spam, even for me. It doesn't start working immediately; there's a learning process (a short one). But it does work, and work well. I'm just lucky to have not gotten my email onto spammers' lists. And I haven't yet had a false positive from it, and DW only had .3%

As for pop-up blocking, I've looked at the proxy filters, and decided I can't be bothered to set them up. What I use for pop-up blocking is Google's Googlebar. It only works for IE (there I go, losing a chunk of the audience), and its primary task is to give you quick access to Google. It's an IE toolbar that gives you a text entry block, a selection of search types, and other options. It works like the Google main site. Secondary functions include pop-up window eating (it's a tad overprotective, it'll get false positives - but the windows are still available, you just have to click on an icon in the status bar) and "autofill". This is a feature that detects fields on a form such as name, address, email, etc, and with one button push will fill them in with information you provide. It also can do the same (with password protection) for credit card info, but I haven't used that feature, since my wallet is usually near at hand, and I don't do that much web shopping. The Google toolbar can be found at http://toolbar.google.com/