Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.