Not sure about the other mail clients most of the time if I need to keep something I have a small seperate partition on my harddrive I save it to. When you reformat the system it doesn't effect the partition as long as you don't delete or format it. As for the spam guards my outlook seems to only download about 30% of my spam mail but believe me that comes from alot of tweeking. As for the ones who get threw I just start researching where they came from and if I can't get them I reak all you know what on the site their advertising for. Believe me when I say there's some people you just don't want to spam.