Outlook is nice and all, particularly when dealing with, oh, 90 percent of the email clients out there. The same thing that makes it nice, also makes it insecure. Some of the email accounts we monitor have been quite public, and receive not only a lot of spam, but also a lot of viruses. If you have an account you need to continue using, but it is starting to accumulate a lot of spam and virus-laden email, one way to easily deal with the email is to use Pine to delete the garbage. You can then use Outlook to see the stray html emails your relatives send you with embedded maps, etc.

You can get a version of Pine that will run fine on Windows here. The only trick, really, is to modify the “inbox-path” variable in pinerc. Many POP servers also work fine with IMAP. Give it a try. Open up your mailbox, press D a bunch of times, and close it again, knowing that you won’t be downloading a bunch of garbage and possible virus-infected email.