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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 used something like Gmail, but "filtered" it again through yourself to make sure nothing unwanted gets through. Say, you setup the kids Gmail, but do not tell them the password or how to get on it via the web, and just set them up a Pop3 client on the computer that will get the mail for them. I think GMail will let you pop in? I do this on my Verizon phone anyway so I assume it's possible, and I don't see my spam folder stuff come down that way. Perhaps in combination with some security on the OS front on your home PC (kids can't log in without getting you, can only use it at certain times, etc) you would have ample time to review what they're getting in their GMail, kill what you don't want to get to them, then allow them to "check their email" via the pop client and (hopefully) still allow them to have at least the feeling of freedom that comes with checking their email and such.
my 7 year old's best friend just moved to N.C. we let them chat on the phone a few times, and they've sent a few emails back and forth via parents' email accounts. My daughter asked the other day why she can't have her own email to write from instead of having to use mine. I said she wasn't old enough. The spam folder thing has been the main reason. I've had quite a few get through gmails filters and land in my inbox.
Probably not what you're looking for, but one option is to get them a Wii. Each Wii has an associated email address of w[friend code]@wii.com, and you have to whitelist any addresses on the Wii that you want to be able to receive email from. Spam-proof, "child-safe", and you can play bowling on it!
I have 3 kids under 8. When they are old enough to read (or starting to), I give them an email account to practice reading and writing.
My solution requires:
First, I setup a mail account for each kid. I'll use family.com as the example. The account for each kid is their first and middle names (jilljane@family.com). Then I setup a mailing list at jill@family.com, and deliver that mail to her account and to my wife and I. Nazi style.
Next, I setup the mailing list names with a postini mailbox. I was running without this for a while, but one of my kids leaked their address to an email marketing firm and the spam started pouring in.
Next, I setup Mail.app. I turn on parental controls, and have all inbound messages request permission from me to land in the kid's mailbox. This way nobody gets in unless I explicitly say it's OK. I setup her client account to return jill@family.com as the identity email address, so replies to any message she sends automatically copy me. No one even knows the jilljane@family.com address exists (except me).
The last step probably won't work for older kids, but I have Mail.app default jill@family.com as a BCC address for any message she sends. This gets me and mom copied on her outbound mail. If she ever figures it out, she could delete that from the BCC field, but so far so good. It also means that I have to manage my own mailbox a little bit. I setup a couple of rules that look for jill@family.com and route that into it's own IMAP folder, just for tidiness.
If you are interested in finding a reasonable host for your own domain with IMAP and Postini support, I strongly recommend BlueHost. Just finished switching over to them, and they have been great.
i agree completely, when my kids were young the computer in the family room faced the couch so we can watch what they did. 12 or so years later its still in the family room, the kids bought their own computers and now have them in their own rooms. If they are old enough to work, buy a computer with their own money they are old enough to take responsibility to use it.
Funny thing is the 17 year old, when his mother asked about porn, said are you stupid, that computer cost me way too much money to screw up with porn sites.
Teach the kids that the internet that isn't a toy, its something they enjoy, use for work, use for school, and maybe some cool games. If you treat it like a toy and hold them from it they will always consider it as such and treat whats on the other end of that internet connection as such.
So when grandma's email address is in the from-field for some porn spam that gets past gmail filters?
The spammers will get into the inbox. You need to be there too if you want to make sure your kids learn the appropriate response to spam.
I know it's convoluted, but you could set up two accounts: one as a proxy account which forwards non-spam to the kid's actual account. Set the kid's actual account in Gmail to use the from address of the proxy account. The proxy account is his public email address.
littleJimmy@gmail.com
Rule: !is:spam
Forward: jimmysSecretAccount@gmail.com
jimmysSecretAccount@gmail.com
From address: littleJimmy@gmail.com
As an added bonus, if someone ever hacked littleJimmy@gmail.com, they wouldn't be in his real email account (and you could use rules at littleJimmy@gmail.com to auto-trash all messages, so only his last 30 days would be accessible in there).
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Why are you trying to shelter your kids from spam? How old are they? People keep saying "5 year old kids shouldn't have such and such", but there's no age given.
If your child is old enough (which is some age less than 15 but more than 10):
Kids are eventually going to see spam and you need to teach them how to handle it. I have the same argument about trying to filter your kid's internet access. They're going to find it anyway, either get around the filter, or to go a friend's house, or whatever.
The solution to children seeing porn online is to teach them about sex. The key is that they know the difference between sex in real life and porn. That sex is something you should have when you're ready, and that porn is something done for completley different reasons than sex. It's stupid to expect that children will never see porn, and to believe that your children will never be exposed to it is ignorant, you need to teach them how to handle it properly.
Likewise, teach them that spam is all garbage. It's stupid and ignorant to believe that kids are never going to see spam. Honestly, it's not that big of a problem though, it's just like junk mail, it's not some horrible moral dilemma.
However if you're kids are too young to see "increase penis size" in emails then they're too young to see the viagra commercials on TV, and they're too young to allow to use the internet.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
He could use GreaseMonkey to write a script that removes the link to the spam folder. It wouldn't be foolproof, but it might be 5-year-old proof.