Parents will soon have a formidable new weapon in the war against cyberbullying, sexting and other inappropriate messages sent to their kids.

A free filtering program will let parents track both questionable e-mails and cellphone text messages.

MouseMail, which launches Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, filters e-mail for improper words and unknown contacts and forwards dubious messages to a parent's account. Parents can send them on to their child or not.

The system is "designed to help a parent manage their child's relationship with the Internet and their relationship, in turn, to their child," says Les Ottolenghi, chairman of the board of Safe Communications.

MouseMail's free Web-based e-mail features will be available Thursday at MouseMail.com; the free text message filtering applications will launch that day on most major smartphones, with Apple iPhone expected to add the app soon. Later this month, a premium service will be added (no price set) that monitors social networks and lets parents look for mentions of their kids' names.

MouseMail is not the first software attempt at thwarting cyberbullying; others include CyberBullyAlert.com and SocialShield.com. But its creators aim to make it the most multifaceted.

(USAToday)

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