Pick any provider. Send photos, voice notes, and the small stuff that won't survive a phone upgrade. Log in once or twice a year so the account isn't deleted, and back up the important pieces somewhere you control.
I came across the idea on Reddit, but it had clearly been around for a while before that. The pitch is simple. Open an email address in your kid's name when they're born, send things to it as they grow up, and hand over the login when they're old enough to care about what's in it.
I did this for both of my kids. My oldest was born during the pandemic in 2020, which has turned out to be the more interesting half of the inbox, because that period is genuinely hard to remember the texture of now. The empty grocery aisles, the rotation of which mask we trusted that week, the way you wiped down a box of crackers in the kitchen and then stood there feeling slightly insane. It was already strange while it was happening. With a newborn in the middle of it, half the small things didn't even register at the time. They only come back later, and the inbox happens to be where some of them landed.
The setup itself is the easy part. Pick any provider you're already comfortable with: Gmail, Outlook, Proton, Apple iCloud, whatever. Make a new account. Send the first email. There is no real difference between providers for this purpose, and a few things people stress about don't actually matter.
Don't get stuck on the username
The biggest one is this: don't worry about getting the perfect username. Your kid is never going to print this on a business card or hand it out at a job interview. They are not going to be sad that [email protected] was taken in 2024 and they ended up with something with a number on the end. The address is a container. It could be a random string and the contents would still be the contents. The temptation to spend forty minutes trying combinations of their name and birth year so it looks clean is the temptation to optimize a thing that no one else will ever see. If you find a clean one in thirty seconds, great. Otherwise pick whatever works and move on.
If your kid is at an age where they're getting their own first email, the calculus is completely different and the relevant guides are about parental controls and supervised accounts. Google's Family Link setup handles that on the Android and Chromebook side, Apple's family setup for child Apple IDs handles it for iCloud, and mail.com has a reasonable overview of provider-by-provider considerations for kid-managed accounts. None of those are really what this is about. This is the version you run in the background for years before they have any idea you're doing it.
The one habit that actually matters
Once it exists, the most important habit is the simplest one. Log in every now and then. Most providers will eventually delete inactive accounts. The thresholds vary and they change. The single most upvoted reply on the original Reddit thread was someone pointing out that an unattended email account quietly disappears, and that's the actual failure mode worth designing around. A reminder on your phone for the kid's birthday or some other annual marker is enough. While you're in there, you might as well send something.
There's a related move worth doing the day you set the account up. Make your own personal email the recovery address. That way if the provider does decide the account is going stale, the warning notices land somewhere you'll actually see them. It also gives you a path back in if you ever forget the password, which you will, because you set it before you'd slept more than three hours in a row. Gmail goes a step further with its Inactive Account Manager, which lets you designate someone who gets access after a long stretch of no logins. It's a useful backstop if you like the idea of someone (your spouse, your kid's other parent, the kid themselves at a certain age) being able to reach the archive if something happens to you.
Email is a fragile container. Back things up.
The other thing the Reddit thread got right, in the back-and-forth more than the original post, is that email is a fragile container for memories. Providers shut down. Accounts get migrated and lose things in the migration. Free storage caps come and go. Anything you actually care about should also exist somewhere you control. A folder on a hard drive, a printed photo book once a year, a cloud drive in your own account that you back up. The email account is the easy, low-friction surface. The durable copy lives elsewhere. Both of those can be true at once.
Videos in particular don't belong in the inbox. They're large, they bump against storage limits, and they make the account heavier than it needs to be. The cleaner move is to keep videos in the provider's cloud drive (the Google Drive or iCloud Drive attached to the same account), and use the email itself for short notes, photos, voice memos, and the small things that don't have an obvious home anywhere else.
What ends up being worth saving
The pandemic stretch is what made me realize what the inbox is actually for. Big milestones are easy. There are a hundred ways to remember a first birthday. The thing the inbox catches is the texture in between. The way a five month old laughed at a ceiling fan during lockdown. The week we drove around just to be in a moving car. The first time a grandparent met the baby through a screen and then, months later, in person. Those don't show up in a photo album. They show up if you can be bothered to type two sentences when something happens, and the easiest way I've found to be bothered is a draft window with my kid's name already in it.
If you've got someone in the family who isn't going to be around forever, this is also the cheapest way to get them on the record. Send the address to a grandparent. Tell them they can write whenever. Some will, some won't. The ones who do leave behind something the kid would otherwise never have.
When to hand it over
The handing-it-over question is more open than it sounds. The original poster on the Reddit thread said he plans to give the login when his daughter is in her thirties, on the grounds that he wouldn't have appreciated it in his twenties. That's one defensible take. Other parents in the comments did it at fifteen, at eighteen, when their kid got married, when they moved out. There isn't a correct answer. The only thing worth deciding now, while the account is still mostly empty, is whether the version of your kid you imagine reading it is the eighteen-year-old or someone older, because that does change what you put in it.
You don't have to know that yet. You just have to send the first email.
Last reviewed May 25, 2026. If your family's shape doesn't match the one this guide assumes, write back — the guide gets sharper the more households I hear from.
