Parental Controls to only allow gmail access

[mirwohl]

Is there a way to set the parental controls of TotalProtection 2015 on a user that will only allow them access to gmail via any internet browser?

[exbrit]

Moved to Parental Controls for better support

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Peter

Moderator

[Hayton]

mirwohl wrote:

Is there a way to set the parental controls of TotalProtection 2015 on a user that will only allow them access to gmail via any internet browser?

There might be a way to do this, but I haven't tested it fully.

The user will be, as far as Parental Controls is concerned, a child, so you'll need a user account with restricted (non-Admin) privileges. Once that is set up you can do the usual things to restrict logon times, length of session and so on, but to provide the highly-specific access you want you should set the permissions to be for a child of less than 5 years old.

That allows, as default, only certain classes of website. Select "Kid Safe Websites" and click on the double-chevron to move that category into the Blocked section. You now have no allowed classes of site that can be viewed, which should be a total ban. This I have not tested.

Next, click on Optional Settings to get this window :

The URL as shown will take you to the GMail login page. The URL changes of course during the loading phase and again after loading is complete so you may need to add some URLs to the whitelist (the one I see after loading is https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox). Once logged in to GMail the user then has access to all sorts of Google programs including YouTube; you could try blocking explicitly in that Options window anything you consider unsuitable or unnecessary.

As an alternative to this you could install an email client program set up to download to the desktop from GMail; as this would be a local application it should not need whitelisting in Parental Controls, which would then (in theory) be blocking all user-initiated attempts to access the internet. As I say, I haven't tried this.

That's about the best I could come up with. Let me know if it's at all helpful - someone else might want to do this at some point.