Best advice is to abandon use of Outlook, Outlook Express, and Internet Explorer. That, and never download anything executable unless you are really, really, really sure about it. Especially not file sharing programs et al.
Use free stuff that is open source. Even though I am not a programmer, and I have no interest in source code, the popular open source software are being constantly updated and reviewed by pros world-wide, so they are very trustworthy and are likely to be safer than commercial products that use spyware to make money.
Software can send anything you are doing on your computer anywhere, you don't know what it's doing. So if you use popular, free open source software, you have a high assurance that people are constantly reviewing the code and making sure there isn't anything funny in there.
I use Mozilla, and Firefox is the latest and greatest browser that is open source and free.
Both will drastically lower your susceptibility to spyware if only because most attacks are on what everyone else uses, and you won't be using those. The free open source software does have issues but they are addressed instantly when found.
Download Firefox
here
Mozilla
here. Mozilla includes email and browser. To dump Outlook or OE, you can either replace everything including IE with Mozilla and you will get a vastly superior program in most ways, or you can use Firefox and
Thunderbird.
I have no experience with Thunderbird but I am sure that it is very good and you will not be sorry. Internet Explorer is a sorry POS and when you see how good these new, free browsers are you will be stunned.
My Mozilla came with good importing tools that let me snarf all my Outlook email and phone books into Mozilla and I never looked back. Now I can't stand those few websites that are "optimized" for Internet Explorer
