Good Email For Kids? 489
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."
Is it ok to keep kids off the internet these days? (Score:1, Interesting)
What about (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sigh... (Score:1, Interesting)
This is very much true.
I have two kids, one an adult and the other still a teen. I have never tried to filter the internet for either of them, other than restricting hours so they can get some sleep. Why? Because I don't buy into the pablum argument. You can't change the world, so you must instead raise people who are capable of handling the world, without wearing rose-colored blinders.
As an aside, but kind of related, my kids chastised me once for telling them there was a Santa Claus when there really wasn't. They taught me something about honesty. When they questioned if there is a "god" or "gods", I told them the truth as I know it, that being religions are multiple, mutually exclusive, and typically invented by ancient peoples who thought the Earth was flat. There is no evidence for the existence of a supreme being, one who wears a long flowing beard, one who makes unreasonable demands, nor one who commands stupid fools to ram airplanes into buildings, thus murdering lots of innocent people.
Be honest with your kids, first and foremost. Let them discover the world, but give them a framework to live by.
Re:What the problem with Gmail? (Score:3, Interesting)
Get a Wii (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:Situation where a whitelist is good (Score:1, Interesting)
My 6 year old daughter has a GMail account. I have a filter set up on it that automatically forwards then deletes any emails that are not from a specified white list. This won't work for an older child who knows how to edit filters and such, but it works for now. She loves being able to use Google Chat to chat with Grandma and likes to scan pictures she draws to send to her friends and family.
What I Do -- It's a little involved, but it works (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [bloehost.com]. Just finished switching over to them, and they have been great.
Re:Bluebottle worked for me (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Is it ok to keep kids off the internet these da (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not a parent, but if I was, I'd have an age when they could get on the Internet. The internet is not a safe place for young kids in my opinion.
The internet is fine, it's the people that changed.
I mean, kids used to see boobies all the time, back in the day, and they were fine. Then some moron made up a church, and a bunch of ridiculous rules that make seeing bodies some horrible thing. They're "traumatized" because you (yes, you, their parent) made a traumatizing event out of something that never was one.
The correct solution is to stop with all the ridiculous censorship, filtering of content, and properly teach your kids what's going on. They'll be fine. And they'll be less likely to go get impregnate someone / get pregnant because they're better trained than their "protected" friends.
It's exactly the same as alcohol - europe doesn't have a huge college drinking problem, because kids drink, and it's no big thing. We have a college drinking problem in America because a bunch of puritanical prudes dedided to make it a taboo, and take decision making power away from people that need to learn how to make decisions.
So... what I'm saying is, if you want to do your kids a favor; let them access the real internet, and teach them how the world really is.
From a father of 5 young kids (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm a strong supporter of protectionism, as is any responsible parent. If you protect your kids from getting run over by a car, why wouldn't you also want to protect them from sexual predators and pornography on the internet?
My kids, ranging from 1 to 10 years old, have been brought up in a moral environment and don't want to deviate from the rules we've established, but too often smut from the net comes knocking at your door uninvited. This is the kind of thing I've set up protections against.
I've tried a lot of the services, paid and free, mentioned on this discussion thread, but have ultimately settled on one that's partially my own invention, that works very well for us. It probably won't work as well if your kid is actively trying to be deviant, but then nothing but teaching them strong moral values can prevent that, in my opinion.
Here's what I've done:
E-mail:
My kids all have Gmail accounts. In fact, I've used Google Apps so that we have a family domain name ($10/year) and each kid has their own e-mail address (i.e. "jane@does.org"). I've then set up "passwords" on each account, which means that I made a simple Gmail filter that automatically dumps any e-mail without a specific keyword in it into the trash folder. The kids got to pick their own keyword. When they have a friend they want to e-mail with, they just tell the friend to include that keyword somewhere in the e-mail message. They actually take pride in doing this, because it's like having a secret club of people that can send them e-mail if they have the right information. This approach is somewhat like whitelisting, but with the crucial difference that it works without any maintenance at all on my part.
I also use IMAP to connect all of their accounts into my mail reader, so I know immediately when they have new mail, and I often read their messages. Yes, I'm sure there are some of you who will get all up in arms about this supposed "censorship", but I believe it's my legal and moral right to do it, and the kids have never had any issue with me doing it, so where's the problem? As a parent, it's also kind of fun to see the things your kids say as they try to be all sophisticated with this new communications medium, experimenting with smiley faces, etc.
Web: /. I'm sure) have a lot of computers in our house. Inevitably one would get out of whack, and then it would take me (as the resident IT guy) forever to get around to fixing it. It was also just one more app I'd have to install and configure any time I reinstalled an operating system or bought a new computer.
I used to use web filtering solutions that resided on each computer. This never did work well because we (like many on
Instead, I now use D-Link's SecureSpot. This is a device which sits between your modem and your router and does content filtering. This means of course that you only have to configure one thing, and that you don't have to install anything on the client computers. What's more, if you have a friend's computer on your network, you still get the same benefits, without any extra configuration. SecureSpot has lots of other features, like spam filtering and virus scanning, but I don't use any of those, they just make things too complicated. I'm also aware of a competitor to SecureSpot, called "iBoss" from "Phantom Technologies". I'm not sure which is better, they probably both would work fine.
Re:What the problem with Gmail? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:What the problem with Gmail? (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Just teach them (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:What the problem with Gmail? (Score:2, Interesting)