All kids love receiving mail, but mine especially like the appeal of having their own email accounts. KidsEmail.org gave us an Annual Subscription of their online services to try out with my kids to see what we thought.
Parents are able to receive a copy of incoming and outgoing emails, set it up where kids can only send and/or receive from people in their contact list, have access to editing the contact list disabled for their children, allow or disallow images, allow or disallow links, block senders, and more. Additionally, you can ground your children for a set amount of time (hours, days, weeks, months) or for a specific date. You can also set time restrictions by the hour or day.
For kids, it is very customizable on their end, too! They are able to choose from a variety of templates/themes for the visual look of their email inbox and composition window. They’re able to do quite a few different types of formatting and changes to the emails that they send, including changing the text font, size, and color, centering their text if they want, and even including numbered lists. They are also able to use Smileys.
If you have it enabled, they can also attach files in their emails. This would be handy if your kids want to send photos, or perhaps copies of typed school assignments.
I love that I can see when logins were attempted. This is also helpful if the restricted times option is set up, because you can see when your child tried to log in but was unable to due to those settings.
I chose to set up my daughter’s email as a “kmail.org” address rather than “kidsemail.org” so that she could feel a little more grown up. It’s cool that you are able to change the settings at a later time to transition younger kids to the older kid setting as well without having to set up any new accounts. It allows the older kid to feel more independent and grown while still allowing the parent to monitor and keep tabs on the emails their child is receiving.
They also offer a free 30 day trial so that you can see if it’s something you might like. No credit card is required to give it a whirl.
I really appreciate the extra steps that this company has taken to ensure a safe product for children to use. I’m thrilled about the features on the parent’s end, because it makes it easy to make sure the kids are able to have the flexibility they need to send and receive emails with the security I need to know that they are not being bombarded with unsafe, inappropriate, or spam messages.
My daughter liked being able to pick from the different templates and is excited to have her own email address to use instead of sharing one with all of her brothers, which is what we were doing before this review. This makes it easy for her to organize her own subscriptions to online game accounts and things like that so she can keep track of her own things. It also gives her a way to email her grandparents (and me!) that is strictly from her.
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