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I have had problems with AVG letting things get by. I use ETrust Antivirus from Computer Associates along with firefox and thunderbird. I don't have anything ratcheted down. I use Adaware and run a scan once a month - it doesn't find anything.

One thing I do use is what we call Inbox Sentry which is a challenge/response spam blocker that holds email on the server until I release it to Thunderbird - that keeps the auto-executing crap away from my system.

It may be that you have something on your system that hides itself pretty well, then runs when you start your web browser and installs more junk. Those are hard to get rid of but will make your life easier if you can manage to find them.

I got rid of windows 98 too - what a security hole that was!

I would guess that if you can find a way to screen your email before you download it that will stop 99% of the junk from getting to you and then you can let scripts run again.

I would guess that if you can find a way to screen your email before you download it that will stop 99% of the junk from getting to you and then you can let scripts run again.

Check out K9--it's free, and beats anything I've ever paid for or installed on Unix.

It takes a little setup--you have to know how to set your email client to use a non-standard port (configurable in K9), and you'll need to tell it what's spam when it misses things for a while. After a "training" period you hardly know it's there, but all your spam emails go whereever you tell your email client to put them. You can configure it either to change the subject line of spam, or add a special header (that's configurable, too)

From a clean installation on a new machine in December, my stats are showing 99.24% accuracy on 32,958 emails processed. It's missing only one or two spams a month now, with zero false positives since I installed it. My last installation ran for years with similar results.