Yes, but should being online require THAT MUCH? You and I do this for a living, but the average user can’t spend the time to write his own user definable CSS and custom filters. Silly rabbit :)
— James 
You assume that everyone can protect themselves. At home I am Master of all Computers. At work, however, I’m not given admin rights nor allowed to install or update anything. Your STFU doesn’t apply to most of the people I know who were hit; they know how to do protect themselves but are at the mercy of professionals.
Obviously if you’re in a restricted environment then you’re at the mercy of that environment. But the people I heard whining last week have had ample opportunity to protect themselves. Instead, they chose to fritter away their time until it became a crisis, and then moan that email was useless.
I rely on my inbox as much as the next guy (I work remotely for Pete’s sake), but I actively maintain it and it weathered this latest crisis just fine, thankyouverymuch. In fact, the last time it was flooded with crap was when someone specifically targeted me and incited his readers to mailbomb me.
— Mark
To keep my email sane, I’ve been using SpamBayes for Microsoft Outlook (a client-side bayesian spam filter for Outlook). I discovered a simple truth about email viruses: if I don’t ever see them, I never have to worry about accidentally opening one.
The incited emails might be insightful. You ought to publish them!
— Robb Beal
Mark,
Would you care to publish somewhere your user stylesheets ?
They would probably be useful as a starting point for people who browse but do not maintain a site, and thus have little incentive to start learning CSS.
Thanks in advance.
— txm
Many tutorials and examples of ad-blocking user stylesheets can be found with a Google search of “ad block css”. Here are some examples:
http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2003/03/08/000430.php
http://www.codepoetry.net/archives/2003/04/12/block_those_ads_in_safaricaminomozillaphoenix.php
http://www.floppymoose.com/ (this is the one I use)
— Mark
Do your spam filters are really safe? Maybe they catch clean email… Ever happened?
Gosh! I entered my email instead of the URL :)
Here are some non-destructive things I do with my user style sheet:
* Highlight unvisited image links with a solid blue border and visited image links with a dashed purple border.
* Put a red icon next to each link to mozilla.org.
* Show named anchors.
I also use it to avoid and disable some things:
* Disable the BLINK tag.
* Hide form reset buttons.
* Cross out links to certain gross-image sites.
* Replace Flash with a “Click to play this flash animation” button (uses XBL).
These and other examples are at http://www.squarefree.com/userstyles/ . A copy of my user style sheet is at http://www.squarefree.com/userstyles/userContent.css.txt .