LadyJean: There are a couple of free browsers with a kill popup option (Opera is one, I forget the others), just remember that many java applets (like crossword puzzles) rely on popups. There are also free popup killing programs. What I hate are animated gifs.

Lets face it. The only thing people like us can do to prevent spam is encourage our governments to make it a 'real' crime ahd send a few of them to prison. I won't use filters because no filter is perfect, you'll always lose some real mail. Instead I use an ancient mail program called pine to check my IMAP account with my ISP. With pine I can accuratelydelete a couple hundred spam in just seconds. Pine is free with linux. I'm pretty sure there's a windows version, too.