OK, OK. Lets remember that we are talking about kids here. By kids I mean ages 5 to 12. The vast majority of kids know nothing about proxy servers or hacking the system registry.

We, as parents, don't want them to get the flood of Viagra, porn or home refinance SPAMs that fill our own mailboxes every day. If kids want to send emails to grandma or their school friends they need something. Expecting some technological solution that is fool proof (or in this case hacker proof) is silly, it can't happen -- ask Microsoft or the folks at Apache. It is up to parents to provide a good and safe solution that probably is perfect for thier child. If little Billy or little Mary is precocious then it is up to the parent to keep an eye on what they are doing and take appropriate actions.

Yes but you need to do that "ban everything, whitelist this safe stuff" thing for the ENTIRE NET if they are to have safe email.

Does Outlook or AOL have an exclusive mode? I've not used either in many a moon.

I think a kid friendly Linux distro could be hacked up without too much effort, any fascisto parental controls would be harder to subvert on that platform. Kidix?

Network Associates own the rights to a Win32 version of SpamAssassin, a popular spam filter. Perhaps Symantec have decided they need to compete with this. (responding to your blog posting rather than being on-topic, but there you go).

Realistically speaking, I guess the only way to guarantee a modicum of safety for your kids email is to blacklist everything and then only whitelist their friends email accounts or whatever.

The KidSafe system you link to sounds good, but even with that kind of client (which reminds me of HotMail with 'exclusive' spam filtering), how do you stop them from opening up their own webmail account?

Even with filtering software hooked up to a firewall blocking unapproved outbound traffic, how're you going to stop little Billy from using a proxy server? (There are browsers like MyIE2 that are designed for use in totalitarian countries, where proxy server settings are in the friggin toolbar).

So if they want to, they'll get out to unfiltered internet land eventually. Technological means won't do it.

Monkey curiosity sees a barrier as nothing more than a challenge!

I think it's similar to TV viewing with children: you just have to teach them well and monitor things, but you'll never be able to absolutely prohibit anything, as you can never monitor usage everywhere and always.

The nanny can't actually prohibit any forbiden thought or access any more than the nanny state can.

Is there a safe way for kids to get email??