The leading email applications include new features for helping users secure and authenticate their mail messages, but each tool has a different approach to handling tasks such as signing and encryption. This article describes how to add encryption and digital signatures to the Thunderbird, Kmail, and Evolution mail clients.

Don’t look now, but your mailbox is full of junk, and a snooper is live on a distant server, reading your opinions of your boss. Remember when email used to be easy? To restore some sanity to your correspondence, you’ll need the right tools.

Even if you do not have a mail server of your own, SpamAssassin can help you filter out unsolicited junk mail. This article describes how SpamAssassin collaborates with Evolution and KMail. Thunderbird, on the other hand, has its own simple spam-detection feature.

If your help line serves outside users, keeping track of support requests can mean the difference between a repeat customer and a lost customer. If the line serves inside employees, an efficient response means better productivity. Fortunately,several Linux-based applications offer help for your help desk or hotline.

Even the smallest desktop has room

for a panel. If your choice of a window

manager does not support a suitable

panel alternative,you can always add

a panel like SuxPanel. Suxpanel provides

many useful features for the

desktop,and it even it even supports

plug-ins.

Firewalls are typically implemented as routers,but it doesn’t have to be that way. Bridging packet filters have a number of advantages,and you can add them to your network at a later stage without changing the configuration of your network components.

The KDE Guarddog program promises an easy Linux firewall setup with just a few clicks. Guarddog helps inexperienced users secure computers – and even whole networks – against attack.

Firewalls are becoming evermore sophisticated. Luckily, the tools for managing firewalls are becoming simpler and more accessible for ordinary users