Electronic Mail

Electronic mail has been for some time now the cornerstone for how business and industry disseminates information, communicates, and collaborates with others. This convenient and rapid form of communication, however, is now used among friends and family as a way to conduct business and also stay in touch with loved ones at the touch of a button. Every second of every day we share information, announcements, family photos, and much more. Sometimes even more convenient than picking up the phone, as parents, we are now accustomed to also having the option of communicating with our children’s teachers, school principals, soccer coaches, librarians, tutors, and anyone else involved in their lives. Although text messaging is surpassing e-mail in popularity among our kids, e-mail is still a necessary commodity for functioning in modern society. E-mail is everywhere – at our libraries, homes, schools, Internet cafès, and the increasing number of businesses that provide wireless Internet connection while you enjoy their wares or wait for their services (e.g. coffee shops and doctors’ offices).

Because e-mail is so pervasive in our society, not-so-nice people have used this particular tool to target others for ill purposes. To me, the most reprehensible is how some proliferate links to websites that contain smut and adult material. Worse, sometimes photos and XXX- rated language are included in the e-mail itself. Imagine the effect on your child receiving an e-mail with one of these actual subject lines (known in the pornography industry as “teasers”), “Naked Women Performing Sex with Guns,” “Models Get their Fudge Packed,” “Pretty Married Mom Waits For You,” “Famous victims of parental incest!” or “Welcome to the brutal rape archive!” One question you might ask is, “How do these people find my e-mail address?” the answer is, “It’s not that difficult.” If you include your e-mail address in an online form when it is you enter a sweepstakes, request information, or sign up for a free account that allows you access to something, your e-mail address may be passed on or sold to others who then send you this filth. Before you enter your e-mail address, consider the reputation of the site and carefully read the sites privacy policy. For example, I have little worry about entering my e-mail address when signing up for free access to the online version of the New York times or for downloading a copy of iTunes. I also feel comfortable entering a sweepstakes conducted by the Home and Garden Television Network (http://www.hgtv.com/) as compared to a completely unfamiliar website. I also know that reputable companies such as Amazon.com take their privacy policy very seriously if they are to continue doing business.

Another way that undesirables obtain your e-mail address is by harvesting it from websites in which it is posted. When you post a comment to an online newsgroup, include your e-mail address in someone’s guest book, or when you simply list your e-mail address along with your contact information online, it becomes fair game. Numerous e-mail (and website address) harvesting programs are available to anyone that wants one. These programs, usually very cheap, allow the user to enter key words that it searches for out on the web. If there is an e-mail address on any page that it searches, the program will copy the e-mail address into its database. Within hours, such programs can glean thousands or even millions of e-mail addresses which are then used to send mass unsolicited e-mails. In fact, programs that are designed to send e-mails out very quickly, also known as mass mailers, are also either free or very cheap and easy to come by online. So, be very careful about how your e-mail address ends up online.

To combat e-mail harvesting programs, many companies have moved to online forms which you complete, submit, and then are processed behind the scenes without anyone’s e-mail address ever showing up online. Many online groups also allow you to post comments without making your e-mail address available to others. When you need to reply to a member’s post, you need to login and complete forms instead of using your own e-mail program. People who maintain websites and still want to include their e-mail address in their contact information are now also posting their e-mail addresses in ways that confuse the harvesting programs. So for instance, instead of posting Sabella@GuardingKids.com, you might see the following “Sabella at guarding kids dot com” which you will have to fix before using it in actual e-mail. Yet others are using a coding format called hexadecimal conversion (e.g., see http://www.u.arizona.edu/~trw/spam/spam.htm) that encodes your e-mail address in such a way that people looking at your site do not see anything different, but a harvesting program looking for your e-mail address cannot see it.

Virtually every company that provides e-mail services and every program that allows you to read and send e-mail now include spam filters and blockers. The problem, however, is that these filters and blockers are not foolproof. Given that there are millions of unsolicited e-mails traveling through cyberspace every second of every day, you are still bound to get a few now and then. The filters and blockers are still no match to human scrutiny and judgments. Although they are great deal of help, you cannot rely on these completely to safeguard your children from inappropriate material.

“I want my own television.” “I want my own telephone.” “I want my own money.”... A request that begins with “I want my own ...” is commonplace among households with children. So what will you say when your child asks, “I want my own e-mail account.” Allow me to cut to the chase – I believe that there will be times when our children will benefit from the advantages of instant communication. However, I also know that with the power of e-mail comes great responsibility (and risk). Anyone’s e-mail account is subject to unsolicited adult material, spam, viruses, phishing scams, and more. Thus my position on e-mail accounts: Any e-mail account that a child uses is subject to some level of monitoring by a parent.

Okay, some of you may now have your hands in the air or beating on your chest saying to yourself, “But what about my kids privacy?!” My answer to this is that having a monitored e-mail account does not eliminate a child’s privacy. They can still carry on conversations with others via telephone, social gatherings, and in school. Landline (phones connected by a wire at home) and cellular phone plans now include long distance so private conversations are not limited to others in the local community. Another argument for allowing children to have private e-mail access is, “If I don’t allow this, they’ll just go underground by getting an e-mail account that I don’t know about and isn’t it better that I know about the account?” I don’t think so. In fact, I think this is the same as saying, “I will allow my underage child to smoke and/or drink in my house because if I don’t’, then they will just do it behind my back without me knowing it and isn’t it better that they do it in front of me?” The answer is “no.” However, there actually may be some truth to the idea that a child can (and probably will at one time or another) do things like smoke and drink behind your back. For many kids, a bit of experimenting is not uncommon. Ultimately, the decisions they make about these behaviors may have more to do with the relationship you have with them, the kinds of friends that they hang out with, and what they believe about how these behaviors affect them. And if they are doing these things, it still does not justify alowing them to do them at home.

Next, I want to provide you with some options for e-mail accounts that include varying levels of parental monitoring and restrictions. These levels can be viewed across a continuum from least restrictive (e.g., filtered email) to most restive (a shared e-mail account).