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.
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
> We're lucky to have snatched [ourlastname].[our countries TLD
Been planning to do this for my family as well. But after my (admin) passing, and with multiple children sharing the same domain name, one of my children will have to be the domain admin for everyone in the family. This might be fine if they remain in good terms and have enough trust of the admin to not screw their primary online identity...
I have yet to figure this part of the equation out.
I don't think that family member should be taught to treat this as a burden. Make them treat it as a professional work that has to be done or in absense of that, "teach" some other family member to take the torch.
I have a family member who I have been slowly teaching about tech. Not the how to run a server but the ideas and sometimes the specifics of something.
Most of the time they I force them to "figure it themselves" which has taught them more than tutorials ever could.
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.
I don't see anyone mentioning Google Takeout (takeout.google.com) - it's easy to use.
I have a suggestion to make it easier - At the highest level of your Google Drive, make a folder containing the easily exportable types such as docs, sheets, pdfs, photos.
That's what I meant when I said they would be given the data in a mostly unusable format because Google wasn't told _how_ to export the data by the law.
When they shut down GPM I requested my listening data via Takeout and it was in a format that was absolutely useless to me. OP seemed to be in Germany so Google has been told by the law to allow data exfiltration, but as we've seen with Apple, these companies engage in malicious compliance and there's no guarantee that they'll get usable data from Takeout.
There's also no guarantee that over 18 years the EU regulatory bodies will remain uncaptured, and never reverse course on data controls such that Google could conceivably kill Takeout as a product due to "the excessive costs involved in supporting an organization wide data exfiltration tool"
> 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.
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.
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.
You should be able to find the contents in your sent mail, no? search "in:sent". This is assuming you sent the email from your own gmail account (not sure how other providers stash away sent mail or if they even do).
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.
Kind of ironic since I recall an early Gmail ad showed a father opening an account for his infant, then giving to the child as it got older.
Correction: technically a Chrome ad, yet very heavy use of Gmail. Maybe the trick is to not open it in their exact name? (In the ad they use "dear{name}@gmail.com)
Don’t use Google, get a domain name and use another service where you’re in control.
I use fastmail and have been sending emails to my young sons “email”, which is just a subdomain of my personal email, so I guess technically it’s not his but I have a way to share all the mail with him.
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.
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
> 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.
True! But starting age 5 with a nice (and costly) album print you can go a long way. They eventually start caring for things as well, at some point... maybe :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is sweet and lovely. I do this in two different ways - I send occasional emails to their IDs and write their journals in plain text.
I created their email IDs on my family’s domain so I can transfer them to whichever service provider fits them best. Right now, it is Google Workspace. For those mentioning about Google freezing your account accidentally, I’ve set Thunderbird to download a copy regularly. This is where I can search for emails from 20+ years ago and still reply or re-initiaite a conversation.
For the plain text, I write in the simplest form spiced up with some Markdown such as headings, lists, and the other basic formatting that are human readable. I also add static assets, such as the very funny and super cute images, audio, video, etc., in a folder for references to the journal entries.
All of these digital content for my daughters are in a separate folder with a few sub-folders. The day they want it, I will just give them a folder for them to continue from there.
My first daughter is a teenager now, and she is even more privacy-conscious than me. She has onions layers of personas for her online avatars -- be it for games, school friends, and other online friends. She is adamantly against using AI for creative processes, such as generative AI, though she uses ChatGPT regularly for her studies.
Own the content, while using other hosted or third-party services and have a backup. Be ready with the answer to, “How can I walk out of this?”
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
How would you drip the assets out in the future? What's the mechanism and how would it trigger (in the event of your unfortunate or unexpected demise)?
I love the "unfortunate OR unexpected" demise phrasing.
I've created a document several years ago, after getting married, that outlines what I want to be done with my company, my products, my IP, my devices, and so on.
Now that you mention it, I need to update it a bit.
But yes, the idea is that I'm setting a bit of money aside for my executor to hire somebody to drip-feed the videos with whatever the technology of that year is.
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...)
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.
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"
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....
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.
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?
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.
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.
I do this for my son. I use iCloud, but set it up with a custom domain for him. I send him an email every month on the date of his birthday (he happens to be born on the same date as me, just a different month, so I get to send him an email on my birthday once a year as well).
It’s easy enough to backup through IMAP as well, so I’ll do that until he’s old enough to take charge of the domain himself. This can off course be done with Gmail as well, I just didn’t use that because I already use iCloud and they have free support for custom domains (and I like the idea that my emails to him won’t be scanned for ads or whatever), so I can switch to another provider later if needed.
I draft the emails in my journal software and use that the print out a paper copy as well, which I use to read to him at bedtime (he’s just over two right now). I keep to a pretty strict format: One large image I think he’ll like to look and then the text, which I usually end up editing before I print so it fits on the facing page.
While I love the idea of leaving messages over the years for my kid to have and - hopefully - treasure I'm not sure that email is a great way to do it.
What worse way to introduce a kid to email than having a thousand messages in your inbox! I hate my inbox as is, I wouldn't want to start it off this way.
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.
Personally, years and years of writing perhaps 100 words per year that aren’t my signature has made my handwriting slow, even uglier and harder to read than it already was, and has probably (I wouldn’t know) ruined my stamina for handwriting. I’d have to start such a letter-writing project with exercises to restore my handwriting to some minimally acceptable level, and my experience has been that adding stuff-to-do-before-I-do-a-thing usually means the thing won’t happen.
I think this is a fantastic idea. We all tout the benefits of digital...easier, unlimited storage, able to index and search, etc.
I've sent my wife thousands of texts and emails over the years that are long gone.
Every single letter and note I'd ever written, no matter how stupid, she's saved in a box and looks through almost every year. There's certainly something to be said for the human element and effort of it. Just in case, hey, why not both?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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).
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
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.
Considering how unreliable Google is long-term, most certainly.
Their tendency to maliciously comply with regulation will certainly mean that at some point they'll ask for your (child's) ID and close the account because some rule being violated that didn't even exist back then. Or some utter bullshit similar to that.
I'm all in favor of writing for your son. I'm against doing so via email, and very against using Google products for it. Why not just write a diary or a journal and give it to him when he's older?
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)
During the pandemic I started recording videos for my young kids. I imagine they will watch them when they are 25 years old. I think it will be cool to see the young me (then) and get a first hand, 'historical' account of covid, Trump etc - it's just me, talking to the camera.
The tricky part is thinking about how to get them the videos at the right time. I plan to be very alive in (less than) 25 years, but who really knows what devices and formats we'll be using.
I took this idea and applied it to my parents - asking them to record their life story on video so that I have their stories and our family history. It's taken some urging for them to do it, but I figure that every video will be valuable at some point. Once I got my parents moving on this, I created an app to productize this idea - viography.co. It hasn't found the right fit or messaging yet, but it's inexpensive to run so I'm planning to keep it going as long as I'm using it for my family.
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.
My thoughts exactly. I have a NAS that's locked down locally. It has a Documents folder that has folders for each year. Within those are folders of specific events, dated and named, with photos, documents, and videos of memories. It's easy for my family to browse and contribute to. No online service or accounts required, and backup is as easy as burning it all to a DVD or Blu-Ray
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
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.