SPAM, in and of itself, is not much of a security concern. Other than the fact that, if left unchecked, it can fill up disks and bring systems to their knees, the biggest problems it can cause is wasted bandwidth and lost man-hours as your coworkers delete it.
However, SPAM-filtration can not only help solve these above problems, it can also provide an excellent framework for installing anti-virus scanners that are integrated into your mail system.
We will not be setting up anti-virus scanners today simply because I am not certain of the legality of doing so (can we legally install Sophos on these machines from the U of A's servers?). However, once you have the working content filtration system set up as we will have today, snapping in another component (regardless of component) will be fairly trivial.
One more thing...
One graphical utility which I find myself using all the time is a KDE application called "KPackage".
KPackage provides a unified interface to your OS's underlying package management system. With it, you can see what packages are installed, what files are included with them, what depends on them, and much more. As I said, it provides a unified interface, meaning that you can use regardless of what package system your OS uses (be it RPM, DEB, portage, etc).
