One other tip - more relevant if you're not using a forwarding service though - I've found it's well worth paying for USPS Express rather than USPS Priority Mail for boxes as it's usually not much more money (often in the region of 5%) and is SIGNIFICANTLY quicker - we're talking a difference of 2-3 WEEKS, at least from the US to the UK and in my experience.
Also, some more general tips about buying things online here. Ordering from dealextreme (the non AU warehouse version) takes around a month or more to arrive. Ordering things from HK/Chinese based ebay sellers can sometimes take about the same time, or sometimes take less than a week. You can often find a AU based ebay seller with comparable items and a slightly higher cost if you need something more quickly. If you're buying media (blu rays + console games particularly), order from UK based sites (eg Amazon UK) since they're the same region as us, and you'll run into less problems, as well as them usually being substantially cheaper. DVDs should be region free though.
I'd also thoroughly recommend http://ozbargain.com.au/ where members share good bargains that they've found, in addition to the whirlpool forums mentioned previously
Nobody mentioned Thunderbird with built-in SMIME capability!
Supports full public key crypto with no extra extensions needed. Generate a self signed certificate, and a big key (it can support 8192 bit RSA).
Now you've got end to end crypto. Use Thunderbird with any ISP including gmail with IMAP and SMTP if you want; they won't have a clue what's being sent through anyway.
For additional security, I think Thunderbird supports storing the crypto on a hardware token (smart card) but I haven't tried this.
To me, although there's good OSS photo management software, there's really none I'm aware of that is able to work well with multiple machines. The easiest way to do this would be pick one of the photo managers that uses a database to store photo information, then you basically write the sync agent that pushes updates to one database(+ associated photos) to the others.
Would be a very useful project, and nicely database heavy. Am considering doing the same thing myself using digikam as a base if ever I find the spare time...
"The medium is the massage." -- Crazy Nigel