Update on kid email account

[oceanbaby]

I posted here awhile back about getting an account for my son, and we finally did it. I started out using a paid site (zoobuh.com) but became frustrated with it, so we ditched it (and got a refund). Instead I signed up for aol.com, and then was able to get an account for ds1, all for free. He goes to a kid's portal (aolkids.com) to access it. It has the most important parental controls, but not all. I can determine all emails he is allowed to receive, for example, which was what was most important to me. I set up a contact list for him and he chooses from there to send an email (right now it's all family members and a few friends).

We're happy with it. However, the only downside is that aolkids.com is a pretty commercial site - lots of links to new kid movies and tv shows and the like. So I guess that's the downside of it being free.

Just thought I'd share . . .

[jrabbit]

why weren't you happy with Zoobuh? We've had it for a couple years, and we like it.
--janis

[Lillian J]

This doesn't have to do with your son, but you made me think of something that still gives me a chuckle. When my son was in his mid-teens, he got a call one evening from a girl across the country he said he'd met on aol. I was stunned. He said she was 15, and had run a search in some sort of connections feature in which she'd used the word "humor" and whatever else to find people with like interests - and she found him. Her name was pretty exotic in a faux French sort of way, I thought, and I couldn't help but wonder out loud how he knew she wasn't some 48 year old pedophile ... Well, as with so many other things, I could have trusted him to have a level head, and she actually turned out to be a great person and a very good friend - still is. Not only that, but a few years later, she went to work for AmeriCorps at a soup kitchen/homeless services complex in Chicago, and he went there to visit her and fell in love with the place and the work they were doing there. We ended up later having a visit in California from her and three of the German young men who also were volunteering there. They were all wonderful. That crew left at the end of their one year term to go on with other things, but my son volunteered there for a year - a life changing experience that set the course for his future. And now he has friends all over Germany whom he's visited, as well as still being friends with the now young woman. Who'da thunk! And none of that is to say that making friends online in that way is a great idea for kids - it's just a wonderful exception to the normal rules of thumb. Lillian

[oceanbaby]

Originally Posted by jrabbit

why weren't you happy with Zoobuh? We've had it for a couple years, and we like it.
--janis

Well, mainly because we had problems getting it set up. I added his addresses to his approved folder, and it still wouldn't let us send an email to them. I also didn't like that it was so much different than Outlook or other "typical" email accounts. It just seemed there was very little functionality. It probably would have been fine if we had wanted to wait a few days to get a response from customer service about why we couldn't send emails, but he was hot to get it today (I had been promising all week) and my patience was wearing thin!

Lillian - that is such a cute story!

[yitlan]

Thank you, oceanbaby, for pointing me in this direction from the parenting forum. Ironically, I almost never go to the parenting area and always stop in here, but didn't see your post. I'd love to hear more feedback on these kid email sites from anyone else!

Would you point me to your original post you mention so I can read the feedback there? I couldn't find it going a few pages back.

[yitlan]

Nm! I found it:
http://www.mothering.com/discussions....php?t=1158613