Spam filters have been around for a while now. Most of them do a reasonable job of detecting if an email is spam or not. There is, however, another problem with email that is potentially more sinister. Occasionally I receive emails from acquaintances, some are in my contact list, that say something along the lines of, “Hey, check out this website”. These emails aren’t spam as I know these people. However, more times than not the site(s) they link to suck. I waste precious time clicking on these links only to find that the content at the end of link isn’t worth the web page it’s written on. What we need are crap content filters!

Here is how I see them working: You receive an email from a friend that contains keywords such as “look” and “website”. These are good indicators that the sender of the email is trying to waste your time. There will also be a suspicious looking link to a website in the email. The crap content filter will follow this link and determine if the content is worth looking at or not. This process will take place before the email is put into your inbox. With me so far? If the crap content filter determines that the website linked to in the email does indeed suck, when you open the email your mail client will display a message that will say something like, “Warning! This message contains links to crap content. Read at your own risk”.

The potential market is huge. Think of all the time saved from following links that point to crap. I even have a catchphrase for the product, “Where don’t you want to go today?” 🙂