Eudora is a good emailer; there's a sponsored version that shows you ads, or you can buy it for around $30.

Eudora lets you set up filters, so you can filter your mail into different mailboxes, like Friends, Work, Probable Spam, etc.

(A good way to filter out most spam is to filter out "any header" with the word html in it. After that, you just need to filter out individual subjects like "loan", "size does matter", "earn" and so on. Then you can skim down through the Probable Spam mailbox in case any sad friend has sent you html-styled mail, and delete the rest.)

If you want a good non-Internet Explorer browser, go to www.mozilla.org and download the latest (not the beta) version. Very nice, and not as popular a target for viruses as IE.