[HN Gopher] Sending emails to my three-year-old
___________________________________________________________________
Sending emails to my three-year-old
Author : geek_at
Score : 114 points
Date : 2024-06-10 12:14 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.haschek.at)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.haschek.at)
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Why not put this in an append-only document that you can easily
| ctrl+a/c/v (or print) and move it as needed? Why would you want
| this kind of thing in email?
| statusfailed wrote:
| This lets other family members send emails too, and has an
| interface everyone is familiar with.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Which can in turn be automatically parsed and pull the data
| into said document. So when Google decides that the
| mail/workspace account is banned for whatever reason they
| deem, you don't lose the content, you just change the
| automation tool to the new e-mail address (and inform
| relatives about the new e-mail as well).
| bjord wrote:
| it might be enough just to have a headless email client
| logged in on a personal server somewhere that pulls down
| incoming emails, and can act as a backup in a pinch
| fwip wrote:
| The author says several times that they also encourage other
| people (e.g: grandparents) to email their child, so that's one
| reason.
|
| The act of drafting an email/letter is also emotionally
| distinct from appending to a text file. For example, in a text
| file, you are probably more likely to abbreviate your thoughts
| or omit pleasantries like "Dear son," / "Love, Dad." Each email
| is also timestamped in a way that's much more "provable" than
| text in your file, and also immune to edits after-the-fact.
| loughnane wrote:
| I did this with my kids starting in '06. As the number of kids
| piled up and the years went on we sent emails less and less, but
| its still a good time capsule.
|
| In 2024 I'm working on pulling all that content out into
| something that has more staying power like a backed up git
| repository.
|
| Tech aspects aside, its a great idea to write this stuff down.
| The early years with kids are a flash. In 10 years you might have
| a vague sense that "my wife called me to tell me about some
| random milestone" but it's easy to forget just what she said and
| what you were doing when she told you. Writing it down helps to
| paint a picture.
| tsycho wrote:
| I thoroughly recommend this.
|
| I have been doing this with my kid since birth as well. I tried
| building an app first, but decided that the maintenance costs of
| email (close to zero), and the easy access to multiple people
| (only my spouse and I for now), made email the simplest solution.
|
| My sending frequency has reduced a lot now, but it used to be 3-5
| times a week in the first few years. Once in a while, I'll open
| the account and read the old emails and they are a beautiful time
| capsule.
| exe34 wrote:
| i recommend dumping a backup of the email into long term storage
| elsewhere every few months. otherwise it's a lot of memories down
| the drain if $provider decided "oh we didn't like your emailing
| patterns and deleted your account"
| geek_at wrote:
| This crossed my mind too. I'm thinking of using a local backup
| of his account for this exact reason
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| This is nice and Google themselves had an ad campaign that did
| exactly this. It will work until Google decides to delete the
| email address for some inane reason. I guess that's partly why
| they nixed that campaign.
| xerox13ster wrote:
| If that was the campaign they ran for the Google+ Photos
| feature launch in 2012 (when they released Photos before making
| it standalone in 2015), the other part is that the campaign
| encouraged people to take pictures of their very young children
| in order to catalog their life.
|
| Then, their Google+ architecture allowed random people not part
| of the family group to view said photos of people's very young
| children, and it got a round in the tech news cycle. They
| started tightening up the architecture and in the process
| decoupled it from the dying Google+ to go on to release it in
| 2015.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Dear Sophie
|
| https://youtu.be/zhPklt9nYas
| xerox13ster wrote:
| That's the one! I remember seeing it air on TV in the cafe
| I worked at while I was watching the live blog reveal of
| the original Surface. LOL.
| xerox13ster wrote:
| I hope he never actually knows about this account before he's
| given access to it. I can imagine being raised with this being a
| thing and developing a mind palace around the contents of the
| inbox.
|
| I can't imagine losing access to 18 years of life's history and
| memories because Google decided to kill free accounts, or charge
| more than you're comfortable paying, or they suffer catastrophic
| data loss. Or they decide to kill Workspace accounts and they
| can't be converted, and you are given the data in a mostly
| unusable format bc they weren't told how to export the data by
| the law.
|
| I've lost entire wings of my mind palace because I lost a
| notebook, diary, hard drive, or published works and been bereft
| of that knowledge or those memories. Some wings I've been lucky
| enough to rebuild, others are like if the Notre Dame had never
| been visually captured, drawn, or scanned.
|
| Imagine planning on recording 18 years of your infant's life--all
| their familial social connections and day-to-day happenstance;
| the things that make a person who they are--, preemptively, on
| Google's behalf. Then imagine not even having a guarantee that
| you will be able to use the data you collected for its originally
| intended purpose.
|
| Set this up locally and in a format you control, and can secure
| yourself. Put it on a tape drive or on a USB in a digital storage
| preserver (something to power on the nand cells so they don't bit
| rot)
|
| You don't know who your son is going to turn out to be. He might
| come to resent you for giving Google that level of insight into
| his life, or for recording it at all. After all, you have decided
| that your son does not have a right to privacy, and essentially
| given it away. Better to keep it local so it can be destroyed if
| that's what he would desire.
| geek_at wrote:
| Valid point. I'm backing up my google drive to my NAS for the
| same reason and I should do the same with the email accounts in
| our families google workspace domain.
|
| We're lucky to have snatched [ourlastname].[our countries TLD]
| so my son can have a really nice firstname@lastname.at address
| which in itself seems valuable these days.
|
| I'm also worried that if he gets the account too soon and does
| some kind of unintended wipe, all data is lost so maybe the
| backup is the way to go
| shermantanktop wrote:
| What's your Google backup strategy? Last time I looked it
| required periodic manual steps.
| vmiklos wrote:
| Plain mbsync works fine for email with an app password.
| APIs are there for contacts & calendar backup. I haven't
| tried backing up the rest.
| davchana wrote:
| Not OP, but I have a Google Apps Script running on daily
| schedule which extracts every email older than 30 days as
| .eml file, renames it as YYYY MM DD HH MM SS SUBJECT.eml,
| saves in a Google Drive Folder with YYYY as subfolder.
| Drive itself is synced instantly with my hard drive, and I
| backup that drive occasionally (like around 3 to 5 weeks)
| to another local & rclone to Dropbox.
|
| 30 days so that I can have enough time to delete it. Trash
| & Spam is excluded, and every successful downloaded email
| is labeled to prevent it getting downloaded again in next
| run.
|
| Originally 4 years ago when I started this script, it was
| timing out because of about 15 years of emails. I ran it
| for 6 minutes only, every hour. Now once it caught up, it
| needs only few seconds, and there are only like 5 to 20
| emails caught in its daily net.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Fastmail is a fantastic and inexpensive alternative to gmail.
| dfee wrote:
| > I can't imagine losing access to 18 years of life's history
| and memories because Google decided to kill free accounts, or
| charge more than you're comfortable paying, or they suffer
| catastrophic data loss.
|
| Oof. Google now charges me more than I'm comfortable paying and
| want us to upgrade to the next tier due to data usage.
|
| I'm happy to move off to another email provider, but my wife is
| upset that she'll lose access to all the docs that have ever
| been shared with her on that Google Apps account. This is truly
| hell.
|
| Apparently, after we migrate off we can recreate a free, non-
| email Google apps account "me@mydomain.com", but it'll be
| empty.
|
| Suggestions, and sympathy for poor decision making 10+ years
| ago, welcome.
| svat wrote:
| Just curious: could you delete some of the larger files, or
| do something else to reduce the data usage, to stay within
| the current tier?
| dfee wrote:
| Yes; that's a possibility, too. I'm trying to weigh whether
| that's the best course of action, or decouple our email and
| google docs.
|
| I have seen price increases a number of times already,
| though. What started at $5/mo/user has increased. I do feel
| like a captive, which breeds a bit of animosity, though.
| ck2 wrote:
| Someday Google could very likely terminate gmail accounts that
| block youtube ads
|
| Then there is this which just scrolls on and on forever
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com
|
| (or https://gcemetery.co )
| ericcholis wrote:
| I'd like to do this as well. BUT, I have serious doubts that free
| gmail will be around long enough. Any thoughts on an alternative
| service? DIY with markdown and git hosted somewhere portable
| maybe....
| geek_at wrote:
| Yes gmail or google workspace has blocked accounts or domains
| in the past so I think it would be wise to store the .eml files
| too. just in case
| eitally wrote:
| I created Gmail accounts for all three of my kids when they were
| infants. They're now 7, 13, and 15, and the fact that they have
| accounts makes it SOOOOOOOOO much easier to share them content
| they may care about in the future, like family vacation
| itineraries, congratulatory or welcome emails about specific
| events or achievements, copies of school transcripts, and perhaps
| most importantly, photos & albums. Now that the older two also
| have phones and have their own personal needs for email, it's
| convenient that they have established accounts based on their
| names that they can use, and I use Family Link to manage their
| access to stuff.
|
| Whether you choose Google products, Apple products, or something
| else entirely, I heartily recommend creating accounts for your
| kids when they're young.
| davely wrote:
| We do this with Gmail, too! Just make sure you log into your
| kids' accounts every so often, otherwise Google is liable to
| wipe the account. [1]
|
| [1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en
| sureIy wrote:
| Sounds cool but that vacation itinerary isn't as meaningful to
| your 7 year old as it is to you. Also sounds like a nightmare
| to manage and a liability when Google decides that 7 year olds
| can't have accounts so it's deleted (PayPal blocked my account
| after 15 years because they found out I opened it when I was a
| teenager)
|
| If you want to preserve documents, keep them in your own
| drive/cloud and share the folder once they're capable.
|
| Also once they use/need an email, they probably don't need one
| created by mom 12 years ago already filled with junk that isn't
| theirs -- just my opinion though.
| eitally wrote:
| Google lets you create kid accounts and manage them within
| your family entity, which also then allows you to share
| purchased apps with them, share Youtube/Music/TV
| subscriptions, etc. When kids get to be 13, you can convert
| those accounts to full accounts (but still optionally manage
| them using Family Link).
|
| I don't care if things like vacation itineraries and emailed
| stories about the things we/they did together when they were
| small matter to them or not. We're just giving them the
| opportunity to make that decision, rather than not have those
| memory enhancers at all. My wife's family basically never
| kept anything, and my dad's house burned down with all our
| old printed photos, kid projects and keepsakes in it. It's
| easy to mitigate some of this potential loss through digital
| means.
|
| You're of course welcome to your opinion.
| any_mouse wrote:
| when your name is Linus you probably could expect to get
| something like this?
| stuckkeys wrote:
| Why not write them on a document page, then pdf them or whatever.
| Save them locally on a disk or some high end drive that you can
| be sure it will not go bad during that time period.
| mattwad wrote:
| email is such an annoying standard for storage. i think i'd
| prefer a simple local SQLLite db with flat HTML files. You could
| use Next.js and output as 'standalone' if you wanna use React to
| generate the HTML
| noman-land wrote:
| If you sync with Thunderbird, it puts all your emails into
| SQLite dbs that you can peruse.
| immibis wrote:
| Any sufficiently complicated network program contains an ad
| hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of
| half of email or Usenet.
| akho wrote:
| is this satire.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| We did this, setting up the Gmail address over a decade ago. I
| occasionally log in to ensure it is an "active" account in
| Google's eyes. And it's fun to read what we wrote back then.
|
| But actually we didn't send that much. It's easy to forget the
| account exists during day to day life. Most of the emails are
| from when our child was a small baby. Still nice to read.
|
| A bunch of comments have rightly pointed out that Google could
| suspend the account, close down Gmail entirely, etc. Well sure.
| Bad things can't be entirely ruled out. But at least to me, this
| was a whimsical and easy idea, not life and death. If it
| disappeared I would be sad but life would go on.
|
| On the other hand, my child has a clean name-based Gmail address
| reserved in case they need it later for internship applications
| or whatever.
|
| I think it is extremely unlikely that Google pulls the plug on
| Gmail since it is the default identity token for all Google
| accounts.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| How about setting up a local wiki or Obsidian-type notebook for
| this? It is much more expressive and there are plenty of plugins
| that allow embedding of timestamps etc. Easy to copy, backup and
| share with full control too.
| magpi3 wrote:
| With all due respect to everyone here, the most expressive
| solution is a photo album (or multiple) where you put pictures,
| little notes and drawing with your handwriting, etc. for the
| child to discover as they get older. I suppose the total volume
| of photos people take is a problem, as are home videos, but
| this can also be fixed with an offline solution, perhaps a
| thumb drive that has multiple backups.
|
| It's a beautiful idea though and I don't want to put it down. I
| just think tech solutions are a little more impersonal for
| things like this.
| joering2 wrote:
| The closed social network for just my family with simply ability
| to share pics of my kid and are stored encrypted remains on my
| list... I thought when I have kid this will motivate me, now I am
| so busy with my son that I don't have the time to program it.
| Anyone can recommend any simple app that will allow me to share
| pics in very small group of people and have robust control over
| who sees what etc?
| noman-land wrote:
| Matrix/Element.
| akho wrote:
| You cannot show someone an image without them being easily able
| to copy it elsewhere.
|
| I don't see much benefit to e2ee for this, and use Telegram
| (which everybody in my social circles uses anyway). Any chat
| app will work, and many are e2ee.
| jakub_g wrote:
| Check https://www.manyver.se and look up Andre Staltz.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I do something similar with a loved one that has died. Their
| email address still doesn't bounce, but I'm not sure how long
| that will last.
| jcul wrote:
| I do something similar, but offline.
|
| I have a nice notebook and I write letters to my daughters.
| Generally mundane day to day stuff or events that happen.
|
| I hope to give it to them when they are older.
|
| I do like the idea of an email though where you can send stuff
| for the future.
|
| I try to print out physical photo books for them to look back on,
| but I'm not very disciplined on that.
| a_imho wrote:
| Ok, so why not write them regular mails? Much more personal imo,
| you can preserve your handwriting as well, dont rely on an email
| provider, not handing over personal data either etc. Only
| flipside I see it is a bit harder to include digital data e.g.
| videos, but easier to add analog/physical.
| darkwater wrote:
| Nope, don't do that. Well, maybe do it, it won't hurt.
|
| But what you should be doing if you have some little fella
| hanging around is Print. Your. Photos. And put them in a nice
| album, and let them grab it,touch it, look at the photos,
| together or alone. Having a physical copy of your smartphone 's
| photos is just... different
| sebastiennight wrote:
| Yeah, kids love going through the albums themselves (the paper
| copies).
|
| I think the only use case that is better on the phone is video
| (they can't stop watching themselves as younger kids doing
| funny things).
|
| But pics on screens... boring and not something I want to
| encourage
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Agreed, with one caveat:
|
| > _And put them in a nice album, and let them grab it,touch it,
| look at the photos, together or alone._
|
| And then print another batch and put them in a nice album and
| lock it in storage. Kids aged 1-4 will start literally _eating
| the photos_ if you leave them alone with the album for more
| than a minute.
|
| Source: we've made several such albums (and gifted several more
| to our parents) since our first daughter was born in 2019. All
| the albums need replacing now, and at least half of the photos
| need to be reprinted too.
| akho wrote:
| I'm paranoid about these things, and wouldn't trust Google to
| stay in the email business for decades, and not lock me out.
| jll29 wrote:
| It's a lovely idea of you writing to your son, and I thought
| about doing the same a while ago. Meanwhile, I've sent him real
| postcards from business trips.
|
| I think there is nothing wrong with creating an e-mail inbox for
| a kid, but if you write personal messages and attach photos, I
| think self-hosting is the way to go, because you don't know how
| much Linus (or any other kid) will value his privacy once he
| learns about how the world works (from advertising to government
| surveillance).
|
| My wife and I therefore decided there will not be a photo online
| of our child until he can consent to it himself.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Paper > email for these purposes
| sebastiennight wrote:
| The issue with this implementation is that the result is a huge
| batch of data that the new adult has to sort through... I don't
| know how engaging that will turn out.
|
| So my take on it is that I shoot videos for my daughter, with the
| plan that they'll be drip-released (1 per week) to her when she
| either:
|
| - turns 18
|
| - leaves home for "college" or the equivalent
|
| - or loses her dad (me)
|
| I figure that building some anticipation and sharing the story as
| bite-size pieces is emotionally more interesting.
|
| Also...
|
| Last year Google deleted 175GB of data that I'd been storing on a
| _paid_ account for 10+ years.
|
| I don't think they can be considered a durable storage medium...
| especially if your account is a FREE one.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Last year Google deleted 175GB of data that I'd been storing
| on a paid account for 10+ years.
|
| Hopefully that wasn't your only copy. You can currently get a
| 12TB hard drive from Amazon for $90. You can probably fill that
| up with five generations of an entire family tree's digital
| memories and put it in a fire safe. For a few hundred bucks
| including the safe.
|
| Not your drive, not your data.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| I know, right?
|
| The most painful part was that those files were still "there"
| for 30 days before deletion. (They occupied space) but the
| customer support was exceptionnally unhelpful and confirmed
| that I could not access, restore, or backup these files in
| any way, shape or form (even though I'd have been willing to
| pay for it).
|
| So... yes. I've got those 2TB and 5TB drives now. (Working on
| a documentary, so I have two copies of everything in separate
| locations)
|
| I'm not having this happen again
| xerox13ster wrote:
| DO NOT BUY THAT (OR ANY) 12TB RUST DRIVE FROM AMAZON. I
| bought a 12TB drive same day delivery so I could blow away my
| 1.4TB home folder with no qualms about slowly reclaiming what
| I need/use from the backup for a month before I "freeze" the
| data on a shelf.
|
| Instead of copying my library to my shiny Boox Note Air 2 and
| playing with my new toy, I spent Sunday hovering over an
| rsync transfer, cork tapping the spindle when it started
| clicking and grinding after having it for less than two
| weeks.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Where would you suggest buying from instead?
| xerox13ster wrote:
| Next time I want a drive the same day I'm taking the
| light rail to Best Buy. Otherwise probably online from
| Microcenter or Monoprice.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| The brand and model is much more useful information than
| the retailer you got a bad drive from.
| xerox13ster wrote:
| Does the bullshit P&TO, Chinese-alphabet-soup-fake-brand-
| name of the enclosure matter that much? It was a Seagate
| Exos X4 drive inside the "branded" enclosure.
|
| I consider Seagate to be a trustworthy brand, yet the one
| sent to me failed within two weeks and it had no shock
| absorption in the device at all.
|
| When you buy rust drives on Amazon you are rolling the
| dice that you're going to get a drive that's been thrown
| around and could fail within two weeks.
| digging wrote:
| In the case of Amazon, I don't think that's true, but my
| opinion is only shaped by what I read online since I
| don't use it. I'd be wary of getting
| fake/counterfeit/knockoff items even if I thought I was
| buying the real thing.
| thelittleone wrote:
| The dreaded spindle click. Few sounds in tech evoke such
| grief.
| cuanim wrote:
| This is the first time I'm seeing a comment section that uses ssh
| for submitting comments which is pretty cool! I think it'll be a
| nice addition for any blog (along with a moderation system
| probably)
| BeetleB wrote:
| I would suggest using a statically generated blog for this. You
| could even have individual posts for the days things occurred, as
| opposed to rolling it all into one email every few months
| (although that one email may be better composed than the
| individual posts).
|
| Somewhat similar: For over a decade now, I've had an automated
| means of photos being sent from my phone to the PC, and
| eventually into blog posts. It will scan the photos, and generate
| a post for each day there is a photo - putting all the photos of
| that day in the blog entry. I can select which photos to keep,
| and put any captions on them.
|
| My captions aren't well thought out compared to this approach,
| though. But if I _did_ want to make the 3-4 emails per year like
| the submitter day, it 's really handy to have all the photos in
| individual blog posts. I just go through them and get a record of
| what we've been up to in the last few months.
| ale42 wrote:
| It's a really interesting idea. The only thing I am afraid of,
| besides the future-proofness of the solution (but what solution
| is totally future-proof anyway?) which has been already commented
| at lot here, is what my kids would feel knowing we shared lots of
| personal stuff using a service from a company that's not exactly
| known for privacy. Personally if my parents did that I'd be a bit
| upset because I wouldn't agree in the first point with sharing my
| personal life (even my past one) with Google (or Meta, for what
| it matters, although I feel like posting stuff on Facebook is
| worse), as once it's done, there's no coming back.
|
| (EDIT: just seen that xerox13ster actually also commented on the
| same point, so sorry for the repetition...)
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| I did this for my son and my daughter for many years.
|
| Unfortunately, I did it by making them gmail accounts. Google
| without warning closed both accounts when my daughter was 12 for
| being under-age. I lost everything. I tried to appeal to get them
| to unlock the accounts long enough for me to get the contents
| out, but talking to a human being at Google is famously
| impossible.
| Maxion wrote:
| Were these accounts family accounts, or just random accounts
| with no direct affiliation to your parent account?
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| I set them up in 2003. At the time I don't think there was
| any concept of a family account.
| OJFord wrote:
| Nor probably a requirement that you be 12 or older to have
| an account!
|
| An _email_ account! It makes sense for YouTube maybe, and I
| suppose the problem is it 's all intertwined? But then
| there's Android too - is it really expected that if you're
| a (say) 10 year old whose parents think is old enough to
| have a phone (let's not debate that here) is it really
| expected that you skip the set up with Google account flow
| on Android first boot? Because it's very clearly not the
| preferred path; one they don't really want you to take.
|
| Seems like 'underage' accounts should just have restricted
| access, i.e. none to whatever it is (like YouTube) that's
| the problem, I can't believe it's email.
| j7ake wrote:
| So what's the way to do this properly so that Google does not
| delete those accounts?
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| It was all nice until I saw that you are using Google for this.
| Google and long-term are mutually exclusive.
|
| At some point after your death, one of the below is likely to
| happen:
|
| a) password gets lost b) (if 2fa enabled) the second factor
| device or source gets lost c) Some automatic process flags your
| account and permanently locks it d) Google accidentally deletes
| some of your data e) Google accidentally corrupts some of your
| data f) An AI rule accidentally gets triggered and deletes some
| or all of your data g) Google reduces the amount you get for free
| and some of your data gets lost forever
|
| there are many more btw
| klondike_klive wrote:
| I've been doing something like this since my son was born (mixed
| with writing in a book since 2021 to record for myself little
| milestones and funny things he's said and done). I email them to
| myself with his name as the subject line. More as a record of my
| love for him than anything else I guess.
|
| I'm reminded by these comments that I need to do some re-
| organising, backing up and printing out.
| asveikau wrote:
| I set up accounts for both my kids on a VPS with a domain of mine
| at birth.
|
| My oldest is now 11 and has two gmails, one for her school
| Chromebook and another for her phone (seems like they only let
| you use @gmail.com to sign up for a child Google account to set
| up a phone? Otherwise I would have pointed her android at the
| vps), so I set up ~/.forward to forward to both of those.
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(page generated 2024-06-10 23:00 UTC)