Good news for unpopular web hacks everywhere! Those lovely people at 3DR and OMM can now sanitize their e-mails with a new feature in the popular Eudora mail client. The "emotion monitor" tool, Moodwatch, scans your incoming and outgoing e-mails and rates them according to flame intensity. For outgoing mail, it warns you of any possible offense you might cause. For incoming mail, it lets you know how severe a roasting you're about to get.

If this was a government/Microsoft (is there any difference?) tool it would be the sort of thing that had free speech nuts reaching for their copies of 1984 and ranting about how we're all living in a police state, but don't worry: Moodwatch doesn't censor you or 'protect' you from anything. It just gives you advice. You're free to ignore it, and if you don't find it useful, you can just turn it off.

Judging by the Moodwatch web site, it does seem a little over-sensitive. The question "Are you nuts!?" in an outgoing mail gets the maximum rating of three hot chillies, along with a warning that it's "the sort of thing that might get your keyboard washed out with soap". If that's what it considers offensive then some of the mail I get should make it shut the whole program down and turn the computer off.

Eudora is available in three flavours: free, not-so-free, and not free at all. Grab it from here. This is not an advert.