Free, SAFE email service?

  • Thread starter Thread starter babybear
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
B

babybear

Guest
Does anyone know of a good, free, web-based email service that is also safe for kids?

Thank you for your help!
 
Kids should be supervised when using the internet. I’d never give a child free accesss to an email account.
 
Safe is not determined by the website hosting the e-mail account.

Now did you mean safe as in safe for the computer, or safe as in his/her personal safety?

Safe is determined by how you supervise the account (for both the computer and him/her), whether or not you click on links in an e-mail (mainly for the computer), whether or not you open spam messages or messages from an unknown person (usually doesn’t hurt the computer to read a spam message on a web based service, but might be unsafe for him/her).

I use yahoo mail and am very satisifed with it. Some like hotmail, some others. Any common web based e-mail is just as good as any other in most respects. If you want him/her to be safe, you have to monitor the account as well as how they use the account. This is for both computer safety and personal safety.

Oh, and no matter who you use, you’ll get spam. Most spammers randomly spam combinations of letters and numbers to hit most possible e-mail addresses. Which is why you can get spam within a day of opening an account.

So it’s parental involvement that determines safety, that should be your primary concern if you want your kids to be safe.
 
Get AOL with the parental controls.

Also, have your children save their passwords on the sign-on screen and/or have them give you their passwords so that you can login to their accounts if you need to check up on them.

You can stay with them as they check their email. If they get SPAM, a lot of it is sexually-explicit material such as viagra ads and such.

While surfing the internet, watch out for inappropriate pop-up ads and file-sharing programs with pornographic content. If they want to download music, iTunes is safer. Though, they also provide songs with explicit content.
 
Thanks for the quick replies, but let me explain a bit further. I’m not worried about parental involvement - we do NOT allow the kids unsupervised access to the computer nor to the internet. My main concern is the ads that come up on free sites. What average Joe American may consider a perfectly innocent ad, we may think quite offensive and inappropriate. I would like an email account that is free but which has no ads (haha - not likely I’m sure) or at least one that has “safe” ads, if there is such a possiblity. I’m not even worried about spam (although I’d like to avoid it as much as possible) because I can just check the inbox before the child has access to it. So many places offer free internet that I was hoping a good, Catholic site might have such a thing. I found reference to one on the internet but it seems to be no longer available. Catholic Online has free email but I have heard terrible things about it both for its functionality and for its inclusion of highly inappropriate ads.

Thanks for any help you can give!
 
I would vote for Gmail. All their ads are text-only (no banners) and based on keywords from your emails – so I never get any inappropriate ads. Mostly Christian ads and parenting ads, things like that. Whereas my Yahoo account is always giving me banner ads for birth control …

Gmail’s spam filter is very good. Spam goes directly into a spam folder, which gets deleted monthly or so without you having to check it. I believe you can change these settings and make it delete spam right away. In the four years I’ve had my account, I think I’ve only gotten one spam message in my inbox, and it wasn’t anything inappropriate. Their spam filters can tell Viagra ads a mile off!

Just my two cents. I am a highly satisfied Gmail user; I like the way it’s organized and the amount of storage space. I don’t lose messages like I used to with Yahoo or Juno because you can search for what you want. You can also chat within Gmail, but I think you can disable that if you’re concerned. At any rate you can only chat with people you email and give permission to chat with you.

Gmail doesn’t pay me to do this! I just like my email a lot. I was sick to death of all the disgusting spam and ads.
 
I am a fan of G-mail too. I have my two kids on it and watch them while they check their email. G-mail has one of the better Spam filters out there.
 
I’ll throw in another vote for gmail. Like the others have said, since the ads are text, they are rather unobtrusive, I rarely notice them. And the ones I do notice have never been offensive at all.
 
I use gmail, I haven’t received any junk mail and there are no ads.
 
Gmail is good for lack of ads; also, if you want to make ALL of your internet browsing BANNER AD FREE, get Firefox, and install the Firefox addon called ‘Ad Block Plus’! It will automatically block banner ads on ANY site you visit using Firefox. I use it, I love it. ^^ No more smutty ads, no more annoying smiley ads, no more obnoxious date site ads… it’s lovely!
 
Is there a email service for adults that is NOT Yahoo or Google. Yahoo has soooo many ads and I am sooo tired of their left-leaning news articles and advertisements that slow my computer down. Too bad there isn’t a Catholic service? I like BRAVE as a web browser because it blocks a lot of these ads but i want to export my contacts and email from Yahoo and stop supporting them altogether.
 
I use Yahoo for my junk email and Gmail for personal. Yahoo was hacked a few months ago and it looks like some foreign entity now has access to everyone’s financial information there. :mad:
 
sheilathebard said:
Whereas my Yahoo account is always giving me banner ads for birth control …
Click to expand...
Maybe it’s just because I don’t pay attention, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a banner ad for birth control on my computer from any source.
 
ILPeterCanisius said:
Yahoo has soooo many ads and I am sooo tired of their left-leaning news articles and advertisements that slow my computer down.
Click to expand...
Don’t you know that slowing computers down is a left-wing conspiracy? Obama is doing it.

:rolleyes:
 
Another vote for Gmail and Ad Block Plus, I use it on Chrome not Firefox. I also use Ghosterly which stops a lot of trackers and cookies and what not (although you occasionally have to turn it off for some websites to work), it stops a lot of junk on pages too, it blocks comments and some video players, which is good for kids to keep those nasty comments hidden unless you choose to reload them with the comments.

I think Ad Block Plus also takes care of the text ads on Gmail as I just check them and I don’t see them. Or Ghosterly, I’m not sure which.

I don’t ever have to check my spam, gmail is really good at knowing what is spam and what is not. I’ve never had a good message end up in spam or a spam message end up in my inbox (recently, anyway). It deletes automatically, you may even be able to increase the frequency more often than 30 days.
 
Good grief! We’ve resurrected an eight year old thread. Talk about being risen from the dead.
 
WilliamE said:
Good grief! We’ve resurrected an eight year old thread. Talk about being risen from the dead.
Click to expand...
Aaah, that makes more sense. I was wondering who those posters were that were recommending yahoo and aol over gmail!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top