from Hacker News

Sending emails to my three-year-old

by geek_at on 6/10/24, 12:14 PM with 107 comments

• by xerox13ster on 6/10/24, 6:02 PM

  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.

• by GlenTheMachine on 6/10/24, 8:32 PM

  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.

• by snowwrestler on 6/10/24, 6:27 PM

  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.

• by darkwater on 6/10/24, 6:57 PM

  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

• by eitally on 6/10/24, 6:15 PM

  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.

• by loloquwowndueo on 6/10/24, 5:54 PM

  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.

• by Brajeshwar on 6/11/24, 1:43 AM

  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?”

• by jcul on 6/10/24, 6:48 PM

  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.

• by sebastiennight on 6/10/24, 8:13 PM

  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.

• by ale42 on 6/10/24, 8:31 PM

  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...)

• by BeetleB on 6/10/24, 8:29 PM

  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.

• by exe34 on 6/10/24, 5:54 PM

  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"

• by ericcholis on 6/10/24, 6:08 PM

  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....

• by tsycho on 6/10/24, 5:48 PM

  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.

• by joering2 on 6/10/24, 6:33 PM

  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?

• by klondike_klive on 6/10/24, 10:08 PM

  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.

• by wleggette on 6/10/24, 11:48 PM

  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.

• by _carbyau_ on 6/11/24, 10:20 PM

  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.

  I like the general premise though.

• by a_imho on 6/10/24, 6:49 PM

  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.

• by loughnane on 6/10/24, 5:44 PM

  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.

• by noisy_boy on 6/10/24, 6:30 PM

  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.

• by jll29 on 6/10/24, 7:38 PM

  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.

• by bossyTeacher on 6/10/24, 8:32 PM

  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

• by candiddevmike on 6/10/24, 5:36 PM

  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?

• by ElevenLathe on 6/10/24, 6:36 PM

  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.

• by asveikau on 6/10/24, 10:28 PM

  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.

• by anigbrowl on 6/10/24, 7:52 PM

  Paper > email for these purposes

• by yosito on 6/11/24, 2:45 AM

  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?

• by cuanim on 6/10/24, 8:19 PM

  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)

• by mikesabat on 6/11/24, 3:14 AM

  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.

• by stuckkeys on 6/10/24, 6:20 PM

  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.

• by akho on 6/10/24, 7:19 PM

  I’m paranoid about these things, and wouldn’t trust Google to stay in the email business for decades, and not lock me out.

• by vmfunction on 6/11/24, 9:38 AM

  Why not make some physical collage and letters with pics? Last longer. You can have a digital copy of it.

• by any_mouse on 6/10/24, 6:17 PM

  when your name is Linus you probably could expect to get something like this?

• by mattwad on 6/10/24, 6:25 PM

  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