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A new father shares why creating an email address for his baby boy is the perfect gift

His first email may end up being the best one he ever gets.

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An X post by a new father has been making other new parents take note online. It’s regarding a gift and investment he wishes to give his newborn son for when he gets older. It’s not a savings bond. It’s not a car. It’s not even an heirloom. It’s an email address.

@Mellumjr on X shared that he created a new email address for his son. He intends on sending every photo and achievement his child has made to that email address then giving his son the password to that email address when he gets older. This way, the child can have a time capsule full of memories and thoughts from his father during that time to look through and read.



Comments overflowed all over social media, praising this idea.

“So cool! I wish I knew that before.”

“This is the silver lining!..he will always have that!....what a beautiful resource for your son 🥰💕”

“I don’t have kids, but I think this is a fantastic idea!”

Others had already taken the initiative.

“I actually did that for my daughter years before I got pregnant,” replied @Timberowl. “I would write to her about how I couldn’t wait to meet her some day. I sent pics of her ultrasounds and how excited I was. I emailed her while I was in labor, expressing my fear and excitement.”

“I started this in 2016, and have about 300 emails sent to my daughter. Just don’t know when to give her the pw and email. Maybe when she gets married one day,” @juju_f_baby12 commented.

“Exactly what I did for all my 3 kids,” said @heyfarrukh. “My eldest turned 12 two days ago and got the password. All three are also a part of a family photo album shared on Google Photos highlighting their achievements and memorable moments.”

Ever since the invention of the photograph, parents have been taking pictures of their children for prosperity purposes and memories to carry with them and to pass on to future generations. Even before then there were painted portraits for the same reason. While it is special to have a a physical family photo album or scrapbook for your child, the sad reality is that there is a chance it could be lost, misplaced, or destroyed in an accident.

In the digital age, it’s common for parents to save pictures in the cloud and set up hard drives as well to make sure that those images of their kids can be safely retained. One can argue that the best method is to have pictures saved in the cloud, on a hard drive, and with physical copies to cover all bases. Even critical commenters pointed out to @Mellumjr that the email address could automatically be erased if it wasn't regularly active.

But it’s not just photos that make this a wonderful gift to a child. With an email in their name, with those pictures could come messages from the past from a new parent. Videos of moments with time stamps and comments made from the parent to their future adult child. An archive of not just pictures memories that could be revisited on other platforms, but also one-on-one, just-for-them correspondence. A modern, more convenient version of parents writing letters to their future kids.

Who knows, it could turn into their day-to-day email address in which they could revisit their past whenever they want, and recall how much they were loved. There’s no one way to save a memory. Just make sure you have enough storage space, on the bookshelf or in your data plan.

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For anyone who doesn't get why old book smell is special, meet these two scientists.

Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič remember how it smells to enter the library of Dean and Chapter.

The library is nestled above the main floor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, tucked away behind the southwest tower. Coming through the long stone corridors of the cathedral, a visitor is met with a tall wooden door, usually kept closed. The outside world might be full of the smell of fumes from central London’s busy roads or the incense that wafts through the church, but once you open that door, a different smell envelops you. It’s woody, musty, and a little bit familiar.

“It is a combination of paper, leather, wood ... and time,” said the pair.

Photograph by Graham Lacdao/Chapter of St. Paul's Cathedral.

Bembibre and Strlič are scientists from the University College London’s Institute for Sustainable Heritage. Many people might find the aroma of an old, yellowing book nostalgic, but for Bembibre and Strlič, it can be so much more.

For them, what we smell is just as much a part of our heritage as what we see or hear — and they’re on a mission to preserve it.

Matija Strlič smelling a 17th-century archival document at the National Archives of The Netherlands. Photo via Bembibre and Strlič, used with permission.

Though the first thing to come to mind when imagining a "historic odor" might be something like London’s Great Stink, odors don’t just need to be exceedingly unpleasant to be historically relevant. Anyone born after 1960 might get a whiff of childhood nostalgia when smelling Play-Doh’s sweet, yet pungent aroma, for example. Bembibre and Strlič want to create a scientific way to describe those kinds of smells.

For their latest work, the pair used both high-tech chemistry and an old-fashioned human nose to document the smell of books.

Volunteers were asked to describe either the aroma of the cathedral library (woody, smoky, vanilla) or antique books (chocolate, burnt, mothballs). Bembibre and Strlič then combined these descriptors with analyses of the faint, airborne scent-laden chemicals (known as VOCs) that the items or locations were giving off.

The pair then synthesized these findings into the Historic Book Odour Wheel, which pairs the chemical signatures and human descriptors together. Using it, you can see that a book with a rich caramel smell might be impregnated with the chemical furfural or one with an old-clothing funk might be giving off the chemical hexanal.

This wheel is a step toward creating a more standardized scientific vocabulary around aromas, which could be useful for many areas, not just books. Museums, for instance, could use this kind of chemical analysis to build scent profiles of modern cultural attractions or reverse engineer the smell of some long-gone food, event, or time.

"By documenting the words used by the visitors to describe a heritage smell, our study opens a discussion about developing a vocabulary to identify aromas that have cultural meaning and significance,” said Bembibre in a press release.

Museums and organizations are already embracing scent as a part of our heritage.

The Jorvik Viking Centre in York, England, for example, used scents to recreate the authentic aroma of 1,000-year old Vikings. On the sweeter-smelling side of things, the town of Grasse, located in the hills of the French riviera, is pushing UNESCO to officially recognize their centuries-old perfumeries.

A worker sits up to her neck in rose petals at the Molinard perfume factory in Grasse. Photo from 1955. Photo by George W. Hales/Fox Photos/Getty Images

In 2001, Japan’s Environmental Ministry created a list of 100 natural and cultural sites with especially beautiful or poignant scents, such as the smell of sulfurous hot springs, lavender blossoms, or grilled eel.

“We hope that this will raise awareness of people at the local level and lead to a rediscovery of fragrant areas and their preservation,” said ministry official Tetsuo Ishii at the time.

“Our knowledge of the past is odourless,” the authors write in their paper. But our lives aren’t.

Extracting the smell of a 18th-century bible in the Spangle Bedroom at Knole House. Photo via National Trust/James Dobson.

Perhaps it’s fitting for us to finally consider odors as part of our historical heritage, given their special relationship with memory. Unlike sight, sound, or touch, our olfactory bulbs have direct connections to the parts of the brain that control emotion and memory. This could be why research has shown that odor memories are often unusually vivid and emotional.

“Every day we encounter hundreds of smells, and they have an impact on how we think, feel and behave," said the authors in an email. Though we tend to ignore them, we can all conjure up personal, emotional memories through smells, whether it's the scent of cherry blossoms, your dad's cologne, or even opening up a special book.

The authors are now inviting other scientists, philosophers, and researchers to talk about what a heritage smell archive would look like. Perhaps it’d be made up of physical samples or detailed chemical signatures or stories of human life. Perhaps all of the above.

Their work was published in the journal Heritage Science.

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After her former students were killed in a shooting, this principal shared her memories.

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When Yusor Abu-Salha was was killed in February 2015, her entire community was shocked and heartbroken.

Yusor was born in Jordan and immigrated to the United States with her family as an infant. The 21-year-old was a practicing Muslim living in North Carolina, so she said she sometimes felt like she stuck out. But she felt perfectly at home most of the time, deeply rooted in both her faith and community.

Yusor (right) with her former teacher and principal, Sister Mussarut Jabeen. Photo via StoryCorps.

Yusor was kind, compassionate, and known for her generosity.

"She had this sense of giving that really makes her different from other children," her third-grade teacher and former principal Mussarut Jabeen said.

Despite all of this, in September 2015, Yusor, her husband Deah Barakat, 23, and her sister Rezan Abu-Salha, 19, were tragically gunned down inside Yusor and Deah's Chapel Hill, North Carolina, apartment.

But just months before her death, Yusor had joined Mussarut to record an interview for StoryCorps.

They shared memories from the third grade classroom, and Yusor shared how grateful she was that she had been raised in the United States.

Following the heinous incident, Mussarut, who knew Yusor, Deah, and Razan, returned to StoryCorps to share memories of her fallen students.

"I would like people to know and remember [Yusor] as a practicing Muslim, as a daughter, and above all, as a good human being."

Hear Yusor and Mussarut's recordings intertwine in this moving video:

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In 1999, everyone in her family wrote her a letter. 17 years later, she finally read them.

When Abby Van Metre turned 18, she wanted an iPhone. Instead, she got ... a box?

She remembers plopping down on the living room floor of her Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home a few days after her birthday, next to her dog, and staring at the aged brown container. It had been her great-great-aunt's jewelry box. It was over 100 years old and had been passed down to Abby's grandma and, now, to Abby.

But she didn't know what was inside.

Her parents explained that the box was a time capsule filled with letters and keepsakes from Abby's 1st birthday. It had never been opened.

All photos via Abby Van Metre, used with permission.

Instead of gifts, everyone in her family had written young Abby a card or a letter. They also stuffed the box with some newspapers from 1999 and other keepsakes. Then, her parents tucked it away for 17 years. Abby never even knew it existed.

As she started to go through the time capsule's contents, including letters from close relatives who had since passed away, Abby was overcome with emotion.

"I started crying. It was happiness. It wasn't sadness at all," she said. "It was sheer happiness that I got one more conversation with loved ones, one more 'I love you,' one more piece of advice."

One letter, from her uncle who was killed in a car accident three years ago, hit Abby particularly hard.

"It was just a very visceral thing for me, and the moment I started reading it, I couldn't handle it. It was like I was talking to him," she said.

Other letters were lighthearted glimpses into the past.

Abby said one of her cousins — whom she describes as a "big burly Marine" — was 7 when he wrote her a letter for the time capsule.

"In his letter, he attached his favorite Pokemon card, and in his letter he says, 'When you open this, can I please have that back?'"

Abby's mom filmed the whole thing and posted it to Facebook, where it quickly went viral.

"She said, 'Don't worry, it'll just go to my 300 Facebook friends,'" Abby recalled.

When they checked a few days later, the post had racked up millions of views, shares, and comments from around the world.

Letters from Heaven. This week Abby turned 18. For her 1st birthday we asked all our loved ones to write her a letter...

Posted by Susie Aldershof Van Metre on Tuesday, September 27, 2016

"It really put things in perspective for me," Abby said.

"Like, sure, I'd love to have 100 boxes of presents to open and expensive things. But, in reality, I wouldn't trade this gift my parents gave me for anything."

Right now, the box is in Abby's kitchen, where she said she's still going through the letters, two or three at a time, to make sure she's absorbed every word and every ounce of love.

And for the rest of us who wish we'd thought of this ourselves, Abby's story serves as a powerful reminder that, years from now, what we'll value most is the time we shared and the memories we created with our loved ones.

Even if the only place we have to keep them is our hearts.

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