Personally I use POP Peeker for my POP3 accounts. It will also check web based accounts, but I don't have any of those.
I prefer to delete spam before it gets to my email client.
Old fashioned, I know. I come from the old 1200 baud dial up BBS days. Fido anyone?
I used to run MailWasher and it did an excellent job of removing spam. I converted all my domains to GMail hosted, and rarely see spam, so just use POP Peeper to notify me of email as it arrives.
Speaking of Outlook utilities, I highly recommend Xobni. It doesn't look very powerful when you read the description, but just install it and use it for a week or so. See if you want to uninstall it. I'm 20 for 20 on this for people who use Outlook.
http://tinyurl.com/2o9k5l