Sophie – my 6 year old daughter – is on holiday from school at the moment and has spent a little time online playing on her favourite websites. Sometimes she gets asked for an email address to sign up for some kind of club. Today that happened and it lead to a conversation between Sophie and her mum which included questions like:-
“Why do you have an email address and I don’t?”
“Why do we use your email address for clubs I want to join?”
“Isn’t it like a letter, you hand me my letters, and I open them, isn’t email like that?”
..and so on.
Clare suggested that Sophie should speak to me (given I deal with all things technical in the house) which she’s not done yet. I wondered what other people did about online accounts for their children. Now of course being a geek I can easily setup an account for Sophie and give her access however there’s a bunch of issues here.
Firstly I don’t want random people emailing her so I’d need some kind of whitelist so that I can control who can mail her. This makes it difficult for her to sign up to web based services because I don’t know ahead of time where the mail will come from.
I could use greylisting with very long delays and watch the logs myself to see where the mail comes from and then manually whitelist accounts, but if she wants to sign up for something there and then she’s out of luck unless I happen to be there.
The fly in the ointment is that I use Google Mail for Domains for my personal mail. So I don’t have quite the same control over the configuration as I would if I hosted it myself and used postfix/exim/sendmail/whatever.
I could switch back to hosting my own mail but I flat out don’t want to, so that’s kinda out of the question. I could register a separate domain for Sophie but that seems messy. I could forward the gmail to another box which does the whitelisting perhaps?
Of course I could use the dismissive “you’re too young to have an email address” but I’d really rather not.
What do other parents do? Comments/input/suggestions very welcome.
Update: One suggestion made by my very good friend Adrian was that I should teach her to ‘tag’ her email addresses when signing up. That is, adding “+bbc” to the user-part of the address when she signs up at BBC sites for example, and +c4 at Channel4 sites.
Adrian also suggested that I setup a Gmail account for her, but that she doesn’t access that directly, instead I use fetchmail to my own box containing the whitelist, and Sophie should pick up mail from that box. That way I offload most of the spam workload to Google, and can easily implement a whitelist. I like this idea.
)? I guess there are doctors, radiographers, physicists and all manner of other professionals who spot ‘parts’ in the new TARDIS, but this one just leapt out at me. Anyone else spot something out of the ordinary?
It’s a Mugs Game!
Only a few days left until OggCamp and things are really starting to come together. Today Dan emailed the team to let us know that the mugs Fab designed have arrived!
Last year we went for white mugs and they were pretty popular. This year we’ve used the OggCamp colour on smart black mugs. I think they look pretty awesome.
You’ll notice the little “Ogg” dude that Fab also designed. I think he fits in quite nicely next to the logos of all our fantastic sponsors, without whom this whole event wouldn’t happen.
Please buy goods and services from these lovely people!
Linux Format , The Open Learning Centre, The Linux Emporium, Viglen, Bitfolk, OpsView, Canonical, Recruit12, Linux Fund and Apress!
So come along to OggCamp on the 1st and 2nd May 2010 in Liverpool and buy one before they all run out!
p.s. we still have a very limited number of the white ones left over from last year. If you’re really lucky you might be able to pick up the full set!