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Good Email For Kids?
mgessner writes "My kids are starting to want email accounts of their own. Even though gmail does a pretty good job of filtering spam, it's not perfect. Searching the web the other day for kid-safe email, I found a few sites that say they can do the job. What do others do for their kids' email? Pay for it? Just use a free service like gmail or yahoo? I don't pay for email accounts out of my own pocket, so I don't really see the need, but if the cost was a few bucks a month, I'd do it."
If you have the passwords to their email accounts, you can monitor what they do, and that's completely free, obviously. But if you want to filter incoming messages, a quick Google search turns up Zoobuh, and there didn't seem to be negative feedback about it when I tried another Google search. The website says it costs $1/month/child.
I'd also suggest putting a computer as your gateway with Dan's Guardian on it. It's certainly not perfect, but it's the best filter I've ever seen, and allows for different filtering levels through user names. It runs on a linux box, so you can combine it with iptables to disallow a lot of other things like p2p as well. I'd highly recommend it as a good tool to make sure that your internet connection gets used on your terms whether you've got kids or not.
I didn't see mention of whitelist email services like Bluebottle where users choose who they want to accept email from rather than swinging the gates open and filtering out the junk.
GMail is not pretty good at sorting spam, it is the worst I've ever seen. Not only does it let tens of spam-emails through every day, it randomly tags one non-spam mail as spam every week. My former spamassassin only let 1-2 spams through a week, and false positives was limited to 1-2 per year. Compared to spamassassin; GMail is horrible. How can it be that bad, when it can compare so many emails and just check for duplicates????
The solution is whitelisting. Give them an e-mail account with G-Mail, then proxy it through a local mail handler that you have a whitelisting filter configured on. Any address not on the white list gets deleted. Problem solved.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
I have 3 girls, one who's 18 now, so she's old enough to handle herself as she's going into IT anyway. But my 2 youngest (12 and 9) aren't. My 9yo doesn't have an email account yet, mainly because anything she needs me or my wife will handle. My 12yo however, is another matter. In this case, setup Gmail (or hotmail or whatever, I do prefer Gmail's filters, though) to ONLY allow email from people listed in contacts.
That way anything else gets dropped.
Pax Vobiscum
My daughter had an email address with bluebottle.com, which worked perfectly for the 2 or 3 years she was using it. They use a whitelist-only type system which requires new incoming email addresses to reply to an authorization email before their messages will be delivered. When they discontinued the free service, we did not sign up again, but it's probably worth the 10 bucks a year. Now that she is in middle school, she is more interested in using IM services and rarely uses email anyway.
As for the internet not being safe for kids, I've never really found it to be an issue. The kids learn by example and osmosis to behave responsibly. Up to a certain age, we always made sure a parent was around when they were on the net. In the dozen or so years of having internet in the house, the worst incident I can recall was one of my sons searching for she-hulk images and finding a naked drawing in the results. Big deal. He's in college now, and if he wants to find naked she-hulk pictures, at least he knows how to find them.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
As per my earlier comment: this just moves it from Spam to Trash. So the stuff is still accessible.
If you are using a Windows box for your kids, try K9
It's free for home use and the database is the best I have found, with very few of the false positives that you get from other filters (like finding source code examples on somebody's random blog).
It allows you to block video and file sharing sites, P2P, social networking sites, etc., as well as gambling, violence, hate, sex, nudity, etc. so it has a lot of options to turn on or off, giving the parent control. Apparently, it's very hard to uninstall without the password, too.
I don't work for them or anything, just a Dad with kids on the internet.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Totally agree. Most of my friends with kids have one email address that the whole family uses. "jonesfamily@blah.com" seems a little uncool to kids, so I've seen the *family stuff replaced with things like "packofwolves" or other creative ideas.
That's what the proxy is for..
Anything not white listed never gets to Gmail..
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
I just went through the same thing as you in that my children as they are learning to read and write, are wanting their own email accounts. At the same time, I have found GMail to be quite good at trapping spam, the spam does end up going into the spam folder, and much of it is not the type of email I want my children to see (pr0n, member enlargement schemes, pharmaceutical recommendations).
Since GMail is one of the best around, I recommend you use that with Postini, which just so happens to be another Google company. Postini is a pretty good spam filter that you point your MX records to and it filters your emails and sends it on to your email provider. It costs just $3.00, per year, and I still have yet to get any offensive emails that I would not want my children to receive. I have to say that my gmail spam box is mostly empty. The nice thing here is that you can monitor a spam inbox on Postini that your children will never see, and you can ultimately decide what can and cannot go through to their GMail account.
Correct, but you have it backwards. The proxy sits in between the child and gmail. The proxy will poll the gmail inbox periodically (via either POP3 or SMTP), then apply the whitelist to those results. Anything that passes that then gets put in the proxy inbox. The child then connects with whatever client to the proxy to retrieve his/her e-mail. As a bonus you can apply other forms of filtering to the e-mail at the same time you perform the whitelisting. For a really great write up of how to setup filtering, read this.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Then don't let them have an e-mail account. There is no perfect spam filter ... except you filter it by your own.
One solution offers the answer to both of these problems. Maia Mailguard. I'm a huge fan of that project and it is, in my opinion, the single most underpromoted open source app out there. It should be on every sys admin's (at least) radar.
With Mailguard you can set up customised filtering levels (based on spamassassin score). Want manual spam filtering for somebody's account? Set up two email addresses, one for the kid, one for you. Link their address to yours in Mailguard and set the spam threshold score to minus 100. Everything gets treated as spam, and you get a daily notification listing the messages and can go in and manually release the real stuff, and whitelist trusted senders. It even lists things in increasing order of spamminess so the legit stuff will be near the top.
If you are less paranoid, leave the spam detection score at a more reasonable level and let the stuff that is unlikely to be spam go through.
The older your daughter learns the world can be a bad place the harder it will hit her.
The kid in question just started 7th grade. He wants to be able to email his grandparents and a few friends from school.
He's taking a keyboarding class right now (I have no idea why... I learned how to type when I started writing programs...), and it has opened up his interest in the subject.
I'm simply trying to find a safe way to allow him to get used to communicating like this.
"Sometimes the truth is stupid." - Lawrence, creator of Prime Intellect