My dtr is 11 and I would like her to have her own email account (well, OK, SHE want's her own account) but I DON'T want her to see some of the stuff that shows up in mine, unsolicited, I might add.


Anyone know of a good kid oriented free email with plenty of spam blockers and such? Actually, what I want is an account that will only allow mail from friends in her address book.

Thanks,

DZ

I don't know about "free"...but my girls first e-mail accounts (and they still are) with AOL.

They block all kinds of spam, ads and unwanted and unsavory e-mails.

Plus...when the kids log onto the internet, with their screen names...there are the "controls" that only allow them to access family/kid friendly sites.

They have several levels on aol. They have child, teen, mature teen and adult. My almost 13 year old has now moved up to "teen" on the internet. The kids aol has games, kid news and other intrests to them. I know my middle girl plays their games all the time.

Plus...since IM is now the rage with the pre-teens...your 11 year old can IM her friends. I know my almost 13 year old daughter lives to IM her pals.:D :(

Dave,

First start with your ISP and look into their filters. There may be some that you didn't know about before...

I have Earthlink, and they have a mail filter that will delete any mail that isn't in your address book.

As much as I despise AOHell, I haven't heard of a better ISP for kids to use.

Quik Internet has a server-side spam filter, "QuikCop," that can be (and indeed, IS by default) configured to "arrest" email from anybody not on your list of approved senders. If somebody not on the list sends you something, the message is "jailed" until either the sender goes to a web site and adds himself/herself to your approved list, or until you take action on it, or until 48 hours have passed (in which case, it's deleted). If an unwanted sender adds himself or herself to the approved list, you can respond by moving him/her to a list of senders to be unconditionally rejected.

Hotmail's always worked fine for me. Despite all the claims that it's a spam magnet, if you don't going around posting your address everywhere, it's really not a problem.

It also has a privacy setting in which you can request to only receive mail from addresses on your contact list.

Here's some sites that I've found that you may find useful....


Protect Kids (http://www.protectkids.com) run by Enough is Enough

Naval Criminal Investivgative service (http://www.ncis.navy.mil/Safekids/home.htm) Protecting your Kids in CyberSpace webpage

I would also suggest going out to download.com and just doing a general search for filtering software or content blocking.

Personally I use SpamNet (http://www.cloudmark.com/spamnet) to filter out all of my mail. It catches most of what comes into my mailbox, if something gets through I click block and it blocks it for me and all of the other spamnet subscribers. Best 4 bucks a month I've spent!

Another site worth noting here (particularly considering the overall topic of these boards) is Disney's own Surf Swell Island (http://disney.go.com/surfswell/), a rather extensive, and quite well done, site about Internet safety. It is actually a very kid friendly site, basically intended to help kids become familiar with Internet safety themselves. There is some pretty good parent and teacher directed material there as well.

-Jeff

I suggest that you sign up for a free POP3 e-mail account (zzn.com gives you a free POP3, where your address would be yourname@yourname.zzn.com, then use Outlook (or Outlook Express) and a 3rd party software agent (there are hundreds of freeware and shareware ones) that can block spam. I use SpamPal in conjuction with my own mail server for my e-mail. Also, Hotmail has some VERY good spam blocking controls, which let you specify all sorts of things. I use MSN Broadband for my ISP, so I use the Hotmail control to first filter out any obvious Spam, then it is forwarded to my mailserver, where I pick it up through POP3, but not before SpamPal takes a look at it. Sure, it's a complicated setup, but I useally get only 1-2 Spam letters a week in my inbox. The other 200 (yes, I get about 200 Spam letters a week) go to a special "Junk Mail" POP3 account I set up, which I check about once a week to make sure nothing important is in there. I have it set to delete all the letters in there once it reaches 15MB in size. :) :geek:

(yes, I get about 200 Spam letters a week)Yeef! It takes you a whole week to accumulate 200 spam messages? My server-side filter picks up about 40-50 a day, and my client-side filter picks up 50-70 a day. That leaves an average of 2-10 per day that I stick in my otherwise-unused "drafts" folder, so that I can study them to find new earmarks to improve the filters.

Originally posted by hbquikcomjamesl
Yeef! It takes you a whole week to accumulate 200 spam messages? My server-side filter picks up about 40-50 a day, and my client-side filter picks up 50-70 a day. That leaves an average of 2-10 per day that I stick in my otherwise-unused "drafts" folder, so that I can study them to find new earmarks to improve the filters.

Yes, but thats in my regular e-mail account. I have a secondary account that I use for when I need to enter in my e-mail address at any website that I don't expect important e-mails to come from. Over the course of 5 years of me using that account, it has come to recive nearly 300 a day! :eek:

I think general spam filters are fine for adults, but you really need a whitelist filter for a kid's account. You definitely want to look like a mail server that can be set up to only allow messages through from specified email addresses. Look for one where the parent has a separate password that is used to edit the whitelist.

AOL or MSN would certainly fit those needs, probably with the most security. I'm sure there are other options as well, though.

-Jeff

Originally posted by Uncle Dick
Hotmail's always worked fine for me. Despite all the claims that it's a spam magnet, if you don't going around posting your address everywhere, it's really not a problem.

It also has a privacy setting in which you can request to only receive mail from addresses on your contact list.

I would not recommend Hotmail. I have a hotmail account that I use for school which I never posted anywhere, and for some reason I get tons of porn spam. I don't know how they get on there, and I can't get rid of them. I don't understand how they can send out porn spam to all these email addresses since they could be for children.

Hello:

You can't really trust any free mail service (ie hotmail). I'd vote for the suggestion to use a whitelist. Using the "rules" of either Outlook or Outlook express you can add a rule(s) to allow all mail from your kids friends and automatically delete EVERYTHING else.


Another handy tool is a site: www.spamgourmet.com
It allows you to create a one-off email address that only accepts a set number of email. For example the first two lucky readers can email me at: mousepad.2.steve0@spamgourmet.com
past that all mail goes right into the bit bucket. I use it for all the sites that require a "valid" email address for one thing or another.


Steve.

Hotmail already does that... my mail hotmail accout (I too use sock puppets for spam diversion) is set to exclusive, so only people in my address book can send email to it. The rest is diverted to a junk mail folder, which, I grant you, I have to go in and delete, but there's an option to clear the whole folder at one go.

Hi all,

Thanks for all the replies. I (excuse me, I have to close that pesky Yahoo Update pop-up) did finally open a Hotmail acct for her (hotmail for an 11 yr old just doesn't sound right) but anyway when set to exclusive and junk mail deleted as received seems to work. I'll let you know if any undesireable mail leaks through.

Thanks again

dz :)

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