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Send Emails After Your Death
Roland Piquepaille writes "As you all know, the two things in life you can't avoid are taxes and death. But if you will no longer have to pay taxes after your death, you will be able to send email thanks to a new service, Mylastemail.com. The Los Angeles Times (free registration needed) says this service will cost you $9.99 for a three-year subscription. The company says you can update your farewell messages from anywhere in the world, including cybercafes or airports." If it's not a hoax, it's a pretty cool service.
Quick, somebody sign up BSD, they are going to need this soon.
Now, if one could update the messages from the underworld, that might be something worth investing in.
I already have a list of people to send email to about my death in my will. It will be executed for free.
What guarantee do I have that the bulk e-mail to my friends and family won't be snagged by spam filters? That would be the final insult.
I have no doubt that I will be sending and receiving spam messages long after my own demise.
Speak truth to power.
If they don't send the e-mail, can you sue them from beyond the grave?
So this officially depricates going to confront the bad-guy and sending a sealed envelope to someone with instructions like "if I'm not back by midnight, open this letter". We can just use email instead. I can see it now: "I've got the source to your virus Mr. Badguy. If I'm not back to my office in 24 hours, my automated service will email the source to the FBI."
SCO.com uses Linux
That's a convenient service.
I'll just wait until then to give away the money in my bank account in Nigeria.
How about a service to get a "First Post" after your death?
So long and thanks for all the fish.
Let me introduce myself to you.I'm Franka Guei, the former military ruler of ( cote d' Ivoire /ivory coast,). . ,as I confide in you hoping you will never betray me at last.n .com
I was killed on 19/9/2002 with some of my loyalist officers during a cross fire battle between us and government troops in an attempt to seize power through coup de eta in Abidjan on 19/9/2002
At the time of my death, I had the sum of Eighteen million united states dollars only(us$18m) which I still want to move out of here with most despatch despite being dead.
This money was deposited by me before I died in a security company for the purpose of using it to fine tune my administration in the invent that he succeed in the fail coup attempt.
Because of the present situation in my country cote d' ivoire, as well as my being dead, my I need a trust worthy foreign partner who can assist me to transfer the money out of South Africa for investment.
Please, I highly need your assistance both in transferring the money to your country and also investing it in a profitable venture with your kind advice
I have proposed (30%) percent of the total sum of the money for you as your own commission, so as for you to give us all necessary assistance and protection we may need in your Country. Please treat as highly confidential. All the vital documents covering the deposit of the fund in a security company are with me here and will be used to effect change of ownership in your favour for subsequent transfer to any account you may wish to use abroad.
What I want you to do is to indicate your interest that you will assist us by receiving the money on our behalf. Acknowledge this message, so that I can introduce you to my son (MIKE GUEI) who has the modalities for the claim of the said fund. The identity of the finance company where the fund is deposited, will be revealed to you by my son as soon as we recieve confirmation from you on your willingness to proceed, as seeing is believing.
Reach me through this mail box to discuss modalities on how to proceed.Reply to deadpresidentofsomeafricannation@untraceabledomai
Looking forward to hearing from you urgent.
the concept is cool, but there's one thing that doesn't make any sense.. HOW DO THEY KNOW IF YOU'VE DIED????
According to the FAQ on the site, you need to leave some kind of documentation in a place where someone will find it after you've died. That person is then responsible to contact them and have the e-mails sent. Dumb question: If you have to leave a note behind anyway, why use the e-mail service? Why not write letters in envelopes and store them in the same safe place you'll store this document?
Sounds more like a ploy to take money from the naive. Too bad I didn't think of this.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Sounds very much like the Dead Man's Switch that was covered on Slashdot a while back...
If you don't tell it you're alive every now and then, it can encrypt your files, send email, and post messages on the web. Very paranoia.
DEAR SIR / MADAM
My name is Masque and I am writing you from the republic of Heaven to beg your indulgence in the matter
I came to your name through careful study of teh intarweb and u are recommmended as a helfpul and trustworthy person who may be trusted to be helpful and I beleive I can be of help to you in return
BEFORE I WAS FORCED AGAINST MY WILL TO COME TO THE AFTERLIFE I HAD AMASSED A SMALL FORTUNE THROUGH THE LEVERAGING OF MASS EMAIL TECHNIQUES. I NEED YOUR HELP IN TRANSITIONING THESE FUNDS BACK INTO MY POSSESSIONS AFTER BEING SO RUSHEDLY FORCED TO LEAVE MY HOME FOR ASYLUM IN THIS AFTERLIFE....
"Dear world. I was a bastard. I am, however, no more. That plane i was in has crashed into a mountain and my remains have yet to be discovered.
The world considers this to be a great tragedy, but those who knew me can say that the loss of the innocents on-board was well worth my demise.
Feel welcome to defecate on my grave
Thank you.
The deceased."
And a goatse.cx follows...
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
Anyone else see this coming?
From: MyLastEmail.com, on behalf of the late Uncle Kevin
To: My Loving Nephew
Subject: I'll miss you
Attachment: Road Rules for Drunks.ppt (7MB)
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
a simple "BOOO!!!!!"
that should stir up something.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
This is awesome! Now I don't have to go through all the rigamoral of finding a friend to hold snailmail evidence when I blackmail someone. Now I can just say "and if you kill me, the information will automatically be emailed to the New York Times".
The cake is a pie
Yeah, read about it already on the Register. Why would someone want to do this?
That last bunch of bru-ha-ha is the icing on the cake. Basically, this all says "Pay us money. In exchange, we promise nothing, guarantee nothing, but give you a warm fuzzy feeling that everything will be okay if you die... but we don't guarantee or even really hint that you might feel A) warm or B) fuzzy. It's all in your mind. Give us money now, please."
It seems pretty pointless to me. It might be different if A) there was any kind of "real" guarantee and B) e-mail was a more reliable, widely used medium. But the fact of the matter is that there are still millions of people who don't yet understand or even use e-mail, and those who do know that it's not always reliable. If you need this kind of service, pay a live, professional person who knows how to use e-mail, phone, fax, snail mail, etc. to inform those who need to know.
Of course, that won't stop the masses who don't understand e-mail and like warm fuzzy feelings from handing over the cash.
If you read the mylastemail website, they give you a printed document that you keep where people will find it when you die (e.g., with your will). When they receive the printed document in the snail-mail, mylastemail will email out your last messages. So if they never receive the snail-mail, they never send your messages. Whereas with Dead Man's Switch, you have to proactively reset a switch to prevent automatic actions from taking place.
I haven't RTFA because that would against /. posting policy, but I suspect that they subscribe you a mailing list where you get an e-mail with the subject "Are you dead yet?" every day. If you don't reply after two days they assume you are dead and send the e-mail to your list of contacts and promptly sell the same list for profit to the DMA. Because once you're dead, it's not like you can sue them or anything.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
I have little to no contact with my family. I hate writing home. Including e-mails.
Sometimes when I travel I think about my death - I have little social life. My girlfriend doesn't know shit about my family and background.
Several times I've thought of setting up a cron job so if I don't deactivate it in a couple of days, it would notify my direct relatives about my death. Not the best thing to think about when you're about to enter a plane.
Dear Boss,
Susan pissed in your coffee,
John keyed your Jaguar,
and I was the one fucking your wife!
Have a profitable year,
A faithful employee
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
$9.99 for a three-year subscription
Isn't that a little pessimistic?
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Let me get this straight. I print a document from the web site, give it to my trustee, and my trustee is responsible for contacting the web site to inform it that I have died? I'll just give my final messages directly to my trustee and cut out the middleman.
I think that your loved ones will appreciate much more a hand written letter to each one of them than a "email from hell".
It's been done for centuries, just hand write a letter to each of your loved one, and put them with your will. They will get distributed after your death.
GFK's
I "anonymous coward" of no known IP address, being sound in online connectivity, and over the age of credit card ownership,and knowing the uncertainty of dial-up connections and the certainty of disconnection and wishing to dispose of my possessions and belongings both in the real world and in online gaming communities while in health and strength do make this my will.
After the payment of my credit card debts, store cards and porn subscriptions, I hereby bequeath my slashdot username to be auctioned on E-bay and the proceeds donated to the open source community.
I don't like the fact that they charge you $9.99 for an initial three years, and then if you're still alive you need to keep paying top-ups to keep your account open.
Generally, people don't know that they will die in the next three years. There are exceptions of course but the majority of people, even the elderly, expect to be alive in three years. So the result will be that most people don't sign-up because they're waiting "until nearer the time". What if they get run over? Or they're killed? Well I guess their friends and loved ones won't get that last message because this company decided to charge a subscription fee rather than a one-off payment.
I want to use the phrase "emotional blackmail" but I don't think that's quite accurate. There's certainly something ugly about this service, though.
And how long before people start forging a mail's "From:" header to look like it came from this site? Way to make someone's loved ones panic/celebrate unnecessarily.
From: the-late-gudlyf@mylastemail.com
To: <Undisclosed-Recipients>
Subject: Sorry, I died...
Unfortunately, the reports of my death are not exaggerated. ...
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
mydeath.net is a free site (set up by writer, artist and ex pop star Bill Drummond of the KLF) where you can leave full instructions for what you want done in the event of your death, write your own obituary, and so on.
Halfway between a service and a conceptual work of modern art, it's got more entertainment value than giving 9.99 a quarter to some venture capitalists, plus you can browse other people's (anonymous) speficications for their demise while you are waiting to die.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
My roommate in college had dated, and remained good friends with a girl who decided to kill herself. She was still in high school at the time and simply dosed and large number of pills and laid out on a blanket in plain site on the lawn of our local jc. It was, needless to say, traumatic for many of the people involved. It was only compounded though when the time delayed emails from her aol account arrived in several people's inboxes. They were meant as an attempt to soothe the grieving, but the effect was not that. They mostly said things along the line of "it's not your fault, please don't feel bad, I'm happier now" etc. etc. And maybe in the long run it was a good idea, but I am certain the effect of her emails in the short term was different than she expected. Rather than bringing relief it rubbed salt in a wound that was only three days old. Apparently she couldn't delay email more than a week on AOL? maybe they would have been better a month or two later. The whole notion of someone facilitating this effort is a little unnerving though. I know the last thing I want is an email from a dead friend after they're gone.
You pay for 3 years??? If you don't die you have to pay again!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
We moved to a different office and didn't take that phone system with us before I could get around to do ing this, but here is what I wanted to do:
1. Leave a message for my boss (who was also a friend of mine) queued for delivery in three months.
2. Every month, cancel that message and rerecord it, again queued for three months out.
So, if I ever died, 2-3 months after my death, my boss would get a voice mail from me. The message would be suitably creepy, of course.
If Tupac can still be making music and movies after he dies, sending e-mails seems weak by comparison.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
The trouble is making sure the server is still running after your death. Personal boxen will likely be turned off. Scheduling such a process on a work server might be frowned upon. Asking a friend to host it for you doesn't cover all the bases. (what if they die at the same time?)
Then you've got the problem of clock glitches. What if the server boots up, thinks it's 2005, notices the elapsed time, and sends your emails before getting an NTP update?
What's needed is a distributed method of tracking keepalive messages (ha! I kill me!) and then taking action if they stop coming. The system should run on several machines, and they should vote together, to ensure that one misconfiguration doesn't screw up the works. Another trick is keeping the last-message private until it's sent.
When it's all taken into consideration, it's usually easier to let humans make the determination of your death. But don't leave it up to ONE human. Suppose someone found your envelope with the mylastemail document in it, and mailed it in as a prank?
Cryptographers have protocols for dealing with this, it turns out. Assume you have 10 trusted friends, and you want to set it up so that any 6 of them can decrypt your message. Consider "forward error correction" protocols, which allow data to be reconstructed even if some blocks are missing. Simply encrypt your message and then FEC-encode it into 10 blocks, so that a minimum of 6 blocks are required to make the original.
Give each block to one of your friends, with strict instructions not to let any of the others see it until after your death. Ask them to make really sure you're gone before revealing their parts of the key. The last thing you need is for a somewhat exaggerated report of your death to trigger the doomsday emails!