Yes there is a whitelist that you can use to only get mail from certain people. My sons are way to young for an email address. I have seen some of the sites that are for children's email address' and they look pretty good.

Originally Posted by schmuley

My buddy's kids just got their own email addresses - they're 10 and 11. He went with Gmail since he thinks they're pretty good at filtering spam straight out of the gate, and I'd have to agree. Sam

I have less spam at gmail than other places, but it's there and some of it
is particularly nasty to think of a child seeing it. You don't need to spread
your email all over the net because the smammers find it. I think that a
parent first checking the box for porn and nasty spam is a good way to do
it when the kid is... well like under 13 or so, I'd think.

My daughter is 14 now and she has her own email address since she was 12 .At the beginning I did know her address' password as it was me the one who configured that address for her ,but after a while I noticed totally by chance that she did make another email address herself !
For a while I wondered on how to deal with ,then I decided to let her to have some privacy ,only I explained to her that she should not open any email that comes from an unknown address but deleted it immediately 'cause those may contain viruses ( well ...) that would harm our computer so badly we won't be able to use it . She understood and respected this so far .

This is something that I have been worried about as well. Obviously a spam filter will help, but there is always some stuff that gets through there. I think I will just wait to let them have email addresses until I think they are ready to know how to deal with this sort of email.

I would trust my children with an e-mail address of their own and think that it's a great way for them to learn the basics of computer usage, what I would not trust are the spam e-mails they are going to get about "Viagra" and other horrid things that are absolutely unsuitable for their age.
I would probably have to find a very good spam-filter, but I'd still be afraid of the few spams that are bound to eventually leak in somehow. It's very sad, but it's a fact that once connected to the internet there is no safe place to hide.
I would not mind at all for my kids to have their own e-mails but it looks like I would have to do a lot more thinking before deciding if whether it is what's best or not because the risks are just too great for comfort. All those nasty spam e-mails are just something I would dread for my children to find in their inbox.