Kid-safe email

Despite rumors of its demise, email is a ubiquitous way of communicating these days. However, there are some signficant issues when it comes to allowing children access to email. The most obvious one to anyone with an email account is spam (anyone need some Viagra?) Beyond the unsolicited email, there is also a need for parental supervision of communications. You need to be able to monitor all of your child's email exchanges to make sure that inappropriate content is excluded. The existing free mail services (Hotmail, Gmail, etc.) don't really address the specific needs for a child's email account.

It seems like this could be solved with an email client that can be locked down by parents. I looked around the Internet and didn't really find anything that matched up. Maybe a Thunderbird add-in? If you really wanted to limit the access to a computer that the parents have control over, a locked down client makes sense. However, all of the kid-safe email was based on a Web delivery model which has other advantages (can write an email from school or grandma's house).

To solve this problem for our 8 year-old daughter, we got her an account with Zoobuh last week. So far, she loves having her own account and I feel comfortable with the level of control. At her age, we restrict communications to just those in here contact list and control the contents of that list. I'll report back on our experience with this service in a couple of months.