[wplug] Children's email account?

[Kevin Squire]

On Tue, 22 May 2007 12:35:21 -0400
Larry Daberko <larry at daberko.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 	I've got a daugter that wants an email address and I'm trying to
> come up with a way to let her have it, but monitor the content before
> she can see it.  I'm just concerned about spam and unknown senders.
> 
> 	I'd like to know if there's a way I can approve any emails prior
> to her opening them (queueing?).  Whitelisting from specific senders,
> but still getting a copy, is good.
> 
> 	I would probably be using Thunderbird on Ubuntu as the client,
> and the server end is being handled by a webhosting service with 
> standard pop/imap/smtp.
> 
> LBD

My daughter is in 3rd grade, for about a year now she has had her own
email account.  Here is what we did.

1) We have comcast, comcast allows you to set up additional user
accounts.

2) Comcast allows the account to be a "child account" so we control
things like password, whitelist, etc. That might be outside your scope
but though I would through that in.

3) I have a system wide /etc/fetchmail file that grabs all of the
families email addresses. (system wide keeps it under my control as the
root user)

Her section looks like this (Val is my wife, Kevin is me, Ariel is my
daughter.  Watch for wrapping, the mda part is last, and all 1 line):


#poll mail.comcast.net with proto POP3
        # Drops a copy of Ariel's mail into Kevin's account
        user 'EMAIL at comcast.net' there with password 'SECRET'
        is 'kevin' here keep
        mda '/usr/bin/formail -f -A "X-Original-Account:
bratzfan7 at comcast.net" | /usr/bin/procmail -d kevin'

        # Drops a copy of Ariel's mail into Val's account
        user 'EMAIL at comcast.net' there with password 'SECRET'
        is 'val' here keep
        mda '/usr/bin/procmail -d val'       

        # Drops Ariel's mail into Ariel's account
        user 'EMAIL at comcast.net' there with password 'SECRET'
        is 'ariel' here fetchall
        mda '/usr/bin/procmail -d ariel'


Then of course there is a system wide procmail file that calls
spamassassin and clamassassin.  Then Ariel's procmail file sends all
spam to /dev/null

There are 2 issues with this - but it should still give you some ideas:

   1) I could use the system wide procmail to send Ariel's email to the
different mailboxes, I just set it up this way because of what I knew
how to do at the time (now that I look at it, I am thinking I need to
fix that :-) )

   2) There is no "approval" going on.  BUT since I am root, and since I
check my email A LOT more often that she does, the whole approval thing
is not really needed.  If I see something nasty that has made it past, I
can just log in as root and delete that email from here queue.


I guess I should add that my Desktop machine (Debian Stable) use IMAP,
and is the mail server for the family.  All of the family's email
clients are set to send/receive mail from my desktop machine.  Nice
thing there is if something should change (email providers, ports,
password, etc) I only have to fix make changes on the one machine :-)

-- 
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