What if you created a new email address on yahoo or gmail. From there, you tell the email client to read your emails from your real address via POP3/IMAP (without deleting the messages). When you get back from your trip, you remove the email forwarding to the new account. So now, if someone does manage to get access to your email system, they can only read those emails sent to you while you were on your trip. If you dont install SMTP, they wont be able to send messages using your name. Of course, now that you limited their access to the email system, you too are limited in what you can do on it.

So while there are many ways to protect yourself online, if someone is trying to be malicious, they can get access to your account -- the only question is how far they will go in order to accomplish that. I'm guessing that most of these hackers are lazy and figure they can acquire someone else's password much more easily and wont waste their time doing anything too complicated on one person. But if they have the hardware keylogger and the screen capture software (meaning they spent about 100$ in this operation), then you cant really defend yourself in the public domain.