Many people mail us questions which software they need in addition to Spybot-S&D to protect themselves. Well, here is a short list of good applications that we usually recommend.

One of the most important things you need is a firewall. Our recommendation of a good firewall that is also available in a free version is Outpost Free from Agnitum. Note: Don't expect support from those guys though - they need a month to answer every single email, and different support people tell you conflicting things. If your computer crashes after the installation of Outpost, simply uninstall it (the uninstall works fine), and don't hope for a solution coming from them.

You should also have an anti-virus application. The big ones (McAfee, Symantec, ...) are all quite good and easy to find. As we often get asked for free alternatives, I recommend to have a look at Anti-Vir Personal Edition from H+BDEV, which is free for private use.

The third kind of software that is needed would be some kind of spam blocker. If you use Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird, you already have everything integrated. (Update: We have removed the link to MailWasher here, as with more and more spam, it got unreliable and we finally stopped using it, replacing it with the much better Thunderbird filtering as well as our own procmailrc files)

Mozilla as well as Firebird and Opera have popup blocking integrated, but IE does not, and the integrated ones are not perfect all the time either. For novices, I recommend a simple (but nontheless effective) filter like WebWasher; for advanced users who want to tweak every little bit, I recommend Proxomitron.

If you are on dial-up, you should also have some kind of dialer warner. The German YAW is our recommendation for German users (it's not available in English I'm afraid).

To be continued...