My friend is newly divorced. She has met a man (no, not me) and would like to be able to trade emails with him without the knowledge of her 12-year old son or 14-year old daughter. Is there any way for them to do this 100% invisibly? With not even the knowledge that there is this secret account lurking somewhere in the computer?
Thanks.
Sure thing! That’s the beauty of web-based email - doesn’t exist on anyone’s local computer, just the email company’s computer.
She could get an account at Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL or Gmail. However, even if she is careful to check the “do not keep me logged in” options on the site and the “do not save my username or password” options in the browser, her username and password might show up as options if one of her kids happens to go to one of those sites to log in (kids could very well have their own Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL or Gmail accounts). That is, unless she has her own Windows login and keeps her surfing to her own account, but I am going to guess she doesn’t.
Anyway, Google “free webmail” for a list of many many other options.
Does she have a Mac? Safari (the web browser) has a feature called “Private Browsing”, which stores no record of the visited websites anywhere on the hard drive. No URL history, no cookies, no form autocompletion. Access a webmail account with that turned on, and there will be no record of it.
On the PC side, she could use Portable Firefox (a special version of Firefox run on a USB key that leaves no trace of the surfing on the PC).
Yeah, she has a Mac. Thanks.
If she needs to ask questions like that she won’t be able to hide this from seriously motivated nerdy children.
I agree. She should just exchange e-mails from work. If work doesn’t allow personal e-mails, she should get some kind of portable e-mail device with password protection and not share it with her kids.
Or she could just tell the kids about her relationship. What’s so terrible if they learn she’s seeing another man?
Ahh. It just hit me. She’s not really divorced.
When my parents divorced, my mother dated a few different men, none of whom I knew about. Her reasoning was that she was just dating and wasn’t about to introduce strange men to me if she wasn’t sure she wanted to date them more than a couple times herself. She also didn’t want to be seen as dating around.
There are plenty of good reasons to hide your dating from your children, especially if they’re nearly of dating age themselves. Don’t be so quick to judge. 
Edit: I do agree with your suggestion that a portable device would be ideal in this situation. She should get a Blackberry/iPhone/Treo/etc.
She should already have an email account. Unless they have a shared family one. You guys are making her act like a CIA agent. Just get a gmail account and log off.
I’ll just say there is a difference between seriously motivated nerdy children, and children of average nerdiness who aren’t snooping around.
In the former case, I agree with Cryptoderk – if she’s asking this, she should never do anything on her home computer she doesn’t want her kids to see. In the latter case, though, web-mail at home could be safe enough if she has someone to set up Firefox to auto delete appropriate browsing info, and explain which boxes never to check when loggin in.
But even if she leaves her browsing history intact, all that will show is that she logged onto yahoo mail. It won’t allow her kids to open her yahoo mail account unless she writes down the password.
It is perfectly reasonable for a person to have an email account that is not accessable to their children. She should just get a web email account with a strong password and simply log out when she’s done checking it. The existance of such an account doesn’t need to be secret.
Hope the kids don’t install keylogging software on the home machine.
If she does not give them the administrator password (or changes it), doing so would be quite difficult under OS X.
“Mom, I’ve got to install software for World of Warcraft and I need to open up the firewall. Can I get the admin password from you real quick?”
Shibb, former devious youth
“Sorry, you’ll just have to wait 'till I get home, Honey. Go do your homework or read something.” I’m soooo mean.
Instead of Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo, check out one of the lesser-known free email providers that would be ahrder to guess. Check out goowy.com, k.st or ice.is; they don’t have a reputation as being spam sources, so email from them will be less likely to be blocked on the receiving end. I’d also recommend portable versions of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird (see portableapps.com), loaded on a USB memory key. Any settings, cookies and messages should be kept on the key; not the host computer.
That may be, but in that situation, if the children find out, it’s not the end of the world. In that situation, being 98% secure is perfectly adequate. Further, if the children find out that you have an undisclosed e-mail account, it’s no big deal. You just tell them that it’s for private correspondence.
But the original poster wanted 100% invisibility and no possibility of the “children” learning even learning of the account’s existence. Come on! Obviously the consequences of discovery are severe. That means extramarital affair.
I still do not understand why you guys all want her to go buy a USB drive install portable apps on it and use some out of nowhere e-mail service. Make a yahoo account and use that. problem solved.
It’s really a question of how much security is necessary.
The problem with web mail is that anyone who looks at the browser history will be able to see that somebody has been accessing web mail. You can delete the browser history, but that itself might raise suspicion. (Especially for a woman. If a guy does it, people will assume he’s been looking at porn.) It’s also possible that another user of the computer will install some sort of spyware, which really isn’t too hard.
The original poster apparently wanted to be 100% sure that nobody could gain access to the e-mails and that nobody would even learn of the existence of the account.
If you don’t want to take any chances you definately need to remove all traces (or leave none in the first place).
Even with a strong password and remembering to log out there will still be temporary internet files that can be accessed.
I’d go with the USB key idea myself, just to be safe.