ant3

Thanks for your quick responses! I've tried and tried to move us away from Hotmail, believe me, but SMT fail to be convinced. Thanks for the Securus recommendation, although I'm wary about keylogging. We do want to give the pupils privacy in terms of passwords, even if we do want to monitor personal emails during term time. Tom - I didn't think that encrypted pages were a problem for Smoothwall since the March update? I can see what you're saying about sessions though - I presume things like the 'advanced interpreter' work on just following the parameters in the URL rather than storing information on the system? Thanks again for the quick responses, and sorry for any lame spellings - I'm posting from my iPhone.

Long story short, I'm a teacher (puts tin hat on), not very technical (more of a web design woman), who's ended up as quite a large stakeholder on the ICT committee in a smallish independent school in the North West (with little money, hence them letting me have a big say in things even though I'm only 3 years out of uni - eek). So, the committe are looking at implementing Smoothwall Guardian maybe at the start of the next calendar year, but I'd like to clear up a couple of questions before I give my 'yes' vote. Unbelievably, our pupils' email accounts are with... HOTMAIL. Senior management aren't letting us change this as it would create 'too much confusion' (I've just been involved in manually registering 102 Hotmail accounts for next month's new intake). This obviously means that we don't want to block Hotmail completely, but we want to monitor what pupils do on their personal accounts. When they login to their Hotmail, will Smoothwall be able to 'capture' their emails for us to see, or just block those pages which it deems unsuitable. It's all in our user agreement that we will monitor personal emails, but the only way we can do this at the moment us to watch them 'live' on our monitoring software. I noticed in the manual that if you mouseover a URL in a report, the 'advanced interpreter' will show you some more information about the page. In their example, the YouTube video title, a thubnail etc. What would I see if I mouseovered a hotmail URL? Would I be able to see email addresses, email content etc? Cyberbullying is becimg one of SMT's biggest concerns and being able to trackit this way would be perfect. Sorry for being such a newb, but would appreciated any responses. Thanks.