Hi All

As you know, there is tons of spam out there. How can we help protect our kids from receiving such junk?

Well, I was thinking that perhaps email accounts could be designated as either "PIN-protected" or "non-PIN-protected".

For kids, you would set up PIN-protected email accounts. What this means is that all incoming mail to a PIN-protected email account would have to include the PIN, or else it would be deleted automatically from the mail server by the email program.

All that would have to be added to any email client (from the user's point of view) is an extra field to enter the PIN.

Also, PIN-protected email accounts would not be identified as such to any outside entity. The sender would have to know ahead of time that it was a PIN-protected email account and to enter the PIN.

For example, let's say Little Johnnie has 6 friends at school. He gives his Email PIN to his 6 friends. When his friends send him email, they must include Little Johnnie's Email PIN in the Email PIN field, or else their email is deleted by Little Johnnie's email program when Little J checks his email. It's pretty straightforward.

The Email PIN could be changed in case spammers figured it out. Little J would then have to update his friends with the new email PIN.

So, bottom line is that parents would have an easy way to block unwanted email.

Now, what about business use of email or email accounts for the parents and other adults? Well, they could use non-PIN-protected email if they wanted to have an account that stayed wide open, as with some business needs...like "sales@" or "info@". Not a problem. But, they could also designate some email accounts as PIN-protected when they might not need wide open exposure for an email account. This way, you could set up "public" email accounts and "private" email accounts pretty easily as your needs determined.

Well...whatcha think?

Many thanks

------------------------------------------