With all of the viruses, worms and Trojan horses using Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Outlook exploits to take control of your computer, I feel that the safest way to use the Internet is NOT to use Internet Explorer and Outlook. I like Mozilla Firebird as an Internet Explorer alternative, and Mozilla Thunderbird as an Outlook alternative.
Mozilla Thunderbird is user friendly, easy to install, and easy to use. Like all the software on this disk, it's free and open source. Thunderbird is also cross platform, meaning you can use it with Windows as well as the GNU/Linux operating system. I think that the Thunderbird team has done a wonderful job with the user interface. It has a nice wizard style setup when you first run it to help setup Thunderbird to talk to your mail provider. When you are in the standard interface, you will see that the toolbar has been kept simple, with only the most used buttons present. But underneath all this simplicity is some wonder configurations. The best of which is the filtering. With filtering, you can set up Thunderbird to automatically sort your mail to help keep your inbox organized. You can set the filter based on number of different options including senders address, reply to address, subject line, etc.
