<p>I have access to my son's portals because of financial aid. Unfortunately, we put his email as the primary and all the emails go there. He is not responsible about sending the FA stuff on to me so I have his password and log on. We both hate that.</p>
<p>It's a drag to log into multiple accounts and he deserves his privacy.</p>
<p>Our solution? We created a family email account on gmail and then gave access to parents and child. The emails are forwarded automatically to all our accounts so that we don't have to log in to an extra account.</p>
<p>Directed to this email are financial notices, housing deadlines, paperwork stuff that can't me overlooked or missed. Basically anything official to do with money. He also uses it for his highschool email because then everyone gets it and no one is left out of the loop. This is very helpful since son lives in two households.</p>
<p>Anyways, super easy to set up and keeps everyone in the loop!</p>
<p>For step by step instructions you can just google it. Took about 5 minutes total.</p>
<p>I’m sure you will get people who say he needs to take care of all his own stuff without you! Our family e-mails are all aliases of the main one, so I see everything that comes into those for everyone. My H has a gmail he uses which I don’t see, and the college aged kids have their own separate accounts, but for the senior in HS, all her e-mails I see. She doesn’t use e-mail for anything but school stuff - she doesn’t know anyone who uses e-mail to communicate! They communicate on Facebook or by text. There is no private info on her e-mail to be concerned about, only homework reminders or college communications.</p>
<p>Everyone in the family has a private email now that the kids are older but for the bazillion emails and forms and financial aid stuff it was just getting to be a drag with all the forwarding and asking “did you see that FA email I sent?”</p>
<p>I just worried things were getting lost.</p>
<p>This way the official stuff I need to see and he doesn’t care about goes to everyone and private stuff stays private.</p>
<p>Win win!</p>
<p>That’s an elegant solution.</p>
<p>The option we used (an old favorite on CC) was to create an email acount that was used only for college related stuff. Parents and student both had the password, so everyone had access. That kept our personal email boxes free of college spam. We didn’t (don’t, for D2) open any emails until the student has seen them, which is a good way of telling if the student has read them. If it’s something that needs to be opened NOW, then you can pull out the nagging. :)</p>
<p>Having the emails get auto-forwarded on means you don’t have to log onto another account and allows the parents to open all the emails without worrying that the student will ignore an already-parentally-opened email. That’ll certainly work better for some families.</p>
<p>Thanks for sharing. Sounds like this will work well for you.</p>