If you enable parental control on mac osx gmail (popular google mail service) will not be accessible any more. You will get some error messages “Safari can’t establish secured connection to the server ‘mail.google.com’“. GMAIL redirect to https://mail.google.com, which is blocked due to “Try to limit access to adult websites automatically” settings. Probably all HTTPS sites are blocked, because they can’t be verified against some content filters.

Ok, you can put some exceptions to this settings, but I added http://google.com, http://www.google.com, http://gmail.com, https://*.google.com, https://www.google.com, https://google.com, https://mail.google.com, https://*.gmail.com, https://www.gmail.com, https://gmail.com but nothing works.

I enable email access to daughter via mail application, but it is not so fancy like gmail site. You know, custom background to express yourself is the most important feature of every email client.

It is interesting that sites are blocked on very low layer. When parental control is active https://mail.google.com is not accessible even with curl from terminal. Which of course make sense, otherwise child will just install second browser and have access to all content. If of course it would have permission. Of course, apple can scan content of “safe” pages after content is decoded inside Safari, but probably they do not want to do that. Because with this they would process some confidential informations like credit cards number, at some e-shop check out. I can live with that, but I am sure that there are plenty of peoples which are against any processing of confidential informations. How they think content is then show to them without processing, I do not know and do not care.

Do anyone have a solution to this problem? And removing parental control and allow unrestricted access to websites is NOT a solution!

Pictures captured with snagit for mac. Thanks Anže. Great tool.