Some people use their systems for little more than keeping in touch with the outside world. Freeware can help smooth out the bumps in your ride over the e-ways.
Prevent spam from getting its foot in the door: Bayesian spam filters, which can calculate the spam probability of e-mail messages, are all the rage. One such tool is Michael Kramer's Spamihilator (Find it on the April issue OVO; see the screen shot at left), which sits in the taskbar tray and intercepts incom¬ing mail before it gets to your e-mail client.

The product has its own Recy¬cle Bin, from which you can retrieve erroneously halted messages, and a training area where you can teach the software what not to filter in the future. You can specify which senders never (or always) to block, and which e-mail attachment types-if any¬to permit.

Add some muscle to Internet Explorer: Microsoft finally added tabs and other fea¬tures to Internet Explorer; but to make it even stron¬ger, check out the free IE7Pro (Find it on the April issue OVO; see the screen shot above) by Daniel Fang andChris Li. IE7Pro boasts a configurable ad blocker, mouse gestures (for scroll¬ing, navigating, and per- forming other actions by right-dragging the mouse), tab management, crash recovery of your last-open tabs, a tool that dynamically checks spelling as 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. IE7Pro includes user scripts, too. All the above tools are some of my selected few, but if you want more, the Net has a treasure trove of free tools for most of your needs.