Leaving Microsoft monoculture
Thanks to those who left helpful comments to my post about going to non-Microsoft browsers and mail clients. By using non-Microsoft products, one greatly decreases the chances of being hit by nasty viruses and malware.
I’ve decided to go with Mozilla Firefox for the browser and Mozilla Thunderbird for email. Both are open source, and thus free, and are lean, fast, smart versions of the main Mozilla products. Importing my voluminous Favorites from Internet Explorer and Address Book from Outlook was a no-brainer and went flawlessly. Whew. These are not tasks one wants to do manually!
Both have nifty features not found in the Microsoft products. The mail reader, Thunderbird, is intuitive, amazingly easy to set up, and comes with spam filter and spell checker. Both also have dozens of extensions, which are little applets that you can install to perform various handy tasks.
Eudora is also a powerful, highly configurable mail client which is definitely worth checking out.