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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."
That should be a fairly simple conclusion from the fact that (almost) anyone anywhere in the world can send email to any email address.
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Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
The OP probably wants to prevent his kids from viewing the contents of the Spam folder. I know I'm not ready to explain to my 5 year old what a message about "H0t Yung $luts ReadY 2 Suk C0K" is really all about.
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
People anymore are so paranoid about everything anymore, it is a wonder society can even function. If you are THAT worried about it, then DON'T get them an email address.
I'd recommend looking for a service based on a whitelist rather than a service with great spam filtering. This will help you two ways:
1) Probably no spam
2) You can actively monitor and controlwho your children get email from (which is OK, these are children not adults!)
My 12-yr-old has an email under our ISP account that I can monitor and it barely matters. Email is what her Mum & Dad use. Instead, she's obsessed with IM ("MSN" is what she calls it), facebook & MySpace. *That's* what keeps me awake at night.
Cheers,
DCobbler
Then don't let them have an e-mail account. There is no perfect spam filter ... except you filter it by your own. Another question, why does an 5 year old need to have an own e-mail account by itself??
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 understand your point of view. I plan to talk to my kids about sex and treat is as a "normal" part of our existence. However do you see a difference in these two things:
1) Factual, non-taboo discussions about sex, relationships, and even nudity.
2) Porn spam in their inbox, showing nearly gynecological views of women "ready to make you shoot your load" or "watch me get it on with a horse".
I really don't want my 5-year old kids exposed to this level of graphic imagery. Call me crazy. Everything I've read on the matter does indicate it can have a somewhat disproportionate affect on them in later life.
Duh, so his friends can contact him when his cellphone is off.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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 am a parent, and sucessfully raised two daughters, the youngest is 21.
Well, maybe not so sucessfully since they haven't made me a grandpa yet, but the 21 year old manages a GameStop store and neither of them have been arrested. They used computers since before I got on the internet in 1997, the youngest was ten then.
I watched their internet use, the computers were out in the open. Patty was a Jazz jackrabbit fanatic, and one of its artists once sent her a drawing of her as a rabbit.
I never saw anywhere unsafe. You want unsafe? The mall is sunsafe. Church is unsafe. School is unsafe. The youngest got her head bashed in at age 10 by another kid with a bottle. A high school coach here was busted for "inappropriate touching", it's in today's paper. You read about clergy molesting children all the time. In fact, if a child is molested, in most cases it's by a family member; I know a couple of women who've told me they'd been molested.
Your kid isn't going to get run over by a car on the internet, or have her head bashed in. She might break a leg on the swingset or her bike, but she's not getting any bones broken on the internet. The danger is in the real world, not cyberspace.
In the years of watching my kids and paying attention (I read to them, played whiffle ball with them, played dolls with them, played Quake with them, watched TV with them; they're "daddie's girls" now =) not once did I witness anybody trying to harm them - except other kids.
Free Martian Whores!
Lazy? Wow, I think you're asking for it now. Life's too hectic for me to check my kid's Gmail accounts everyday -- I'm busy watching porn and running the meth lab.