Products currently available for monitoring childrens’
email usage are either considered to encourage dubious
ethical behaviour or are time consuming for parents to
administer. This paper describes the development of a
new email client application for children called Mifrenz
(http://mifrenz.com/). This new application gives parents
the ability to let their children safely use email, with the
minimum of intervention. It was developed using mostly
free software and also with the desire to provide real first
hand programming examples to demonstrate to students.