Slashdot Mirror
How To Send Email When You're Dead
The Narrative Fallacy writes "'The Last Messages Club' is a new service that sends personal emails written prior to one's death to loved ones in the future. The messages can range from a final love letter, guidance for someone left behind, a list of instructions, details on life insurance and other financial information. 'No one likes to think about their impending "demise," but it is much better to be fully-prepared, so that there is less stress on your loved ones after you pass away,' says founder Geoff Reiss. The system works by giving each member a secure and private vault where they are able to create messages to be sent specifically to their chosen recipient. A secure process ensures that messages are only sent after at least two people appointed by the user have confirmed that you have died and other safety criteria are met. 'I thought at first that maybe it was a bit ghoulish but on consideration I think it's a great idea as it would be nice for loved ones to receive messages from me when I'm no longer here,' says a technical adviser to the company. 'It's strange really as it makes you confront your own mortality in a sense.'"
Though I suppose it is no more creepier than a will. Does said death-mail have legal standing?
"No one likes to think about their impending demise"
Ever been married?
Captcha: ethanolfueledisafaggot
Sounds just like a movie... Strange, I have a craving for Jameson Irish Whiskey.
That's exactly the same as a will, how revolutionary!!
Stupid marketing people....
There's http://www.youvebeenleftbehind.com/.
Really- it's not a joke.
I haven't been able to find it yet, but I believe this was mentioned on Slashdot at least a couple of years ago. Unless it was someone else running the same sort of site...
So long, Slashdot!
Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. Benjamin Franklin
So how do they figure out that you kicked the bucket?
What if you are undead? Does the email get sent?
A secure process ensures that messages are only sent after at least two people appointed by the user have confirmed that you have died and other safety criteria are met.
Might as well get these two people to send that mail directly to my loved ones.
The idea of a will has existed for quite a while now. And your loved ones will, in all likeliness, find it a lot more useful if you leave them a dead-tree folder with all the collected information on insurances, people to notify, financial information etc. Much less creepy than postmortem emails, and less likely to end up in the spam filter. Not to mention that such a folder is useful in other situations too, such as if you have an accident and end up incapable of taking care of your affairs.
Ask not for who the inbox chimes; it chimes for thee
Is this anything like the Soul Storage Company?
"Sorry love, seems like I snuffed it, lol. Try 2 take care of the kidz!"
Chronologically late.
It'd be cooler to let someone send a tweet from the grave to unleash their botnet...
... but I don't wanna die! :(
Life is too good to waste... Read!
wasn't that in a law and order episode? If I remember correctly there was a bug in the system and it sent out all of the emails early and some guy committed suicide over it
What about a last goatse-like message posted on Slashdot?
Yeah, now in addition to spam from People and Programs there will also be Spam from Ghosts
Legacy Locker is another one http://legacylocker.com/. There was also one a while back specifically for online gamers. If you failed to login in a certain period of time, your guild (or whatever) was notified of your apparent demise.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
1) "I am gonna get ya!" 2) "Dear John, I am writing you to inform that you will die tomorrow. After you die, meet me at the cemetery at precisely 12am". 3) If you are not dead yet, please kindly disregard this message. Otherwise meet with us at midnight and head for the city. Braaaaizzz!!!
Most of us can't even reliably archive our family photos on a computer.
Some companies charged with keeping people frozen cryogenicly can't even be trusted to do that job, and in those scenarios, the frozen person's potential future life is at stake.
All those important post-mortem details mentioned in the summary can very reliably be handled with a safe deposit box, and one or more executors.
The emails can be sent to many many people, even those who probably would not read the will. Like maybe telling an old boss something, etc.
Just print the text and graphics to plain paper, seal it in an envelop and make it part of the estate to be distributed by the executor. Very safe, hack proof and does not require any unusual level of cooperation from third parties nor fees. If you want you can leave a soft copy in a disk or a chip and ask the executor to email the message, if you are hung up over "its got to be email not mail".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
W00t!!!!!
Some folks I know still send us "Our new eMail address" messages, eg,
after each ISP switchover.
How does this company intend to (more or less) guarantee delivery, ie,
for such address changers?
I'm sure Monsanto would be more than happy to help us with that.
On the other hand: How to you check if your mail actually gets sent when you are dead?
Easiest scam ever? Bet on it. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Some people will go to very great lengths in order to get "the last word" in on anything. If you are one of those people, this service is for you!
How To Send Email When You're Dead
I wonder if this would be covered as part of that end of life counseling/planning in the new health care reform legislation. Do we all have an inalienable right to a final email?
A good antispam should protect you from emails coming from invalid senders
How many people change their email addresses and won't receive your message - or have your death message filtered as spam?
How about the good old practice of giving real letters to your attorney and having the firm mail them after you die. Returned mail would be cause for the firm to track down the party who didn't receive the letter...
Just write your emails to be sent after you die and leave them in your drafts box. Leave your email access information in your will and have someone you trust hit send for all of them. That would accomplish the same thing and wouldn't cost a dime.
One, isn't this old news?
Two, isn't this essentially slashdot advertising someone's service?
Would be to do what Abe Vigoda has done ... set up a website with your current status on it. When he finally dies, everyone will know,... and unfortunately the server will probably be slashdotted and die a horrible death within about six hours of Vigoda's actual death,... ;-)
reminds me of Spike Milligan's grave.
...to email "you were ADOPTED and we never loved you!" to his kid?
Last Messages Club is as secure as a bank.
That's exactly what i'm worried about, that it's just as (in)secure as a bank.
If you post all your passwords and papers on a service like this to give to your loved ones when they're gone...
And then the site gets pwn3d by some 13-year-old script kiddie, who dumps the database and starts selling the data, what then?
I think i'll stick with paper letters, a bank lock box, and a safe with the key in it..
(That my survivors get a safe technician to drill in order to gain access to)
Much more secure.
May want to avoid these messages...
Damn, i feel sorry for the poor bastards who don't have 2 people.. oh wait, forgot about those who are completely lonely.
Looks like nobody on Slashdot will be sending last e-mail wills to anyone then.
in his Lazarus Long series, IIRC. It was called "Delay Mail," and was intended for use by time-travellers; there was an office where one could leave messages to be delivered to a specified person (possibly one's younger self) on a specified date, possibly centuries in the future.
I'm afraid this constitutes prior art (insert clever time-travel remark here)...
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Seriously, why? If someone want to send me something, why wait till you are dead? Why not say it now?
Think about what message you would give to the people and then do NOT wait, do it now. If you want to say that you love or hate somebody or something, do not wait. It could very well be that you are not the first to go and then you will walk around with the idea of 'why did I not say it?'.
If you can't say it now, it isn't worth saying at all.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Pandora tomorrow? Good.
Improperly shielded coffins and abandoned modems.
Reminds me of the Tasha Yar memorial video they played on ST:TNG after she got killed. After watching that thing, I decided that I was pretty happy that she got whacked.
This is my sig.
A better way would be to add a watchdog timer to your personal server that periodically checks for your activity on the system (last login, etc). If the timer expires let the system mail everybody automatically and trigger auto-destruction mode.
Next time you go on vacations, don't forget to ssh into the box just to refresh the timer or some people will die or think you died.
Dead man's switch doesn't have this feature either, and I think it'd be really popular. I want more emails. Timed emails. I want to be able to have an email sent out on the anniversary of my death, separate ones for a ten year mark, on specific days of the year. As someone who's lost a lot of people over time, I just think it'd be awesome to have a person die and still be a part of your life like that. Even if it's just a "It's been a while. I just hope you know that I wish I could be there" type message.
Everything will be taken away from you.
What do I need this service for? I use windows, so when I pass away the malware on my computer will continue to send thousands of emails every day.
Blog
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here's a thought: tell them before it's too late. To the living, I see these messages amounting to nothing more than an academic novelty ("I confess") or an elaborate gag ("Here's where I hid the money"). To the physically absent, it's the worst way of talking to someone that you never knew ("Hello to my unborn great grand child") or couldn't tolerate ("This will have to do"). I'm surprised Hallmark Greeting Cards hasn't made a catagory for these people.
Geez. Take the time to write it on paper and stuff it in an envelope. Give it some meaning to the person that you care about.
.
I read an article or blog post somewhere about what to do with your email and other accounts when you die. The writer pointed out that when his father died, having access to his email account was great help cause they had all of his old contacts, as well as on going billing and other stuff. As he said, as more and more stuff moves to email and online, a service like this would might be ideal. You could save your password to various accounts and this thing, and have it sent when you kick the bucket. Less hassle than changing paper versions (including in your will) whenever you change passwords or accounts, and potentially safer than writing it down and sticking it in a box you hope no one ever loses.
Don't be a freak and don't send "emails from your grave". Maybe our twisted minds may see the humor in this, but trust me on this one, most others won't. Well, unless you are a kick ass script writer -in which case, what the hell are you doing on /.?
An email from the grave falls into the same category as making the stupid joke of saying "no" at your wedding. You didn't mean it but your SO is shattered. Let's face it, most of our funerals will be nothing like Graham Chapman's.
If you have anything to say after you kicked the bucket, leave the message at a friend or at a notary's office.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I'm getting better!
No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
Have gnu, will travel.
Once I die, I don't want my offspring to pay the death tax, so I have contracted with a Nigerian attorney to arrange for QUICK INVESTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL FUNDS over the internet. Whomever he works with is authorized to take 30% of the money transferred, while 5% will handle various transfer costs. All the investor will have to do is provide my attorney with their account information by sending a small deposit to his international account.
My favorite part of the site: 30 day free trial!
Hey man, don't forget that Rapture thing. Yeah, there's like a zillion rapture e-mail sites, which are supposed to email all those suckers who don't get RAPTURED!! along with you.
Really heavy duty, doods! I mean, Sarah Palin might even be an email buddy on one of those sites (Swwwooooooonnnnn!).
Where's my barf bag????
Can it be sent in yearly installments?
Here are some questions that are not answered by the FAQ:
As I've spent only a few minutes thinking this through, I'm sure there are other failure modes for which the system might not have an answer.
Linux user since early January 1992.
Thoughts of mortality have been on my mind recently. Two weeks ago I was diagnosed with ALS, a progressive, fatal, incurable disease. Average survival times are 2-5 years; 90% survive fewer than 10 years.
Knowing my time frame is not as bad as it sounds. It does let me plan ahead a little. But I wonder whether this service would be a boon to my survivors. If I have something to say, I know I should say it now (partly because I will likely lose the power of speech within a year or two).
I am thinking it might be good to make a bunch of individual recordings, for everyone close to me, to be delivered after I am gone. It would be especially nice for them as they can see me and remember me as I am now, vigorous and healthy, rather than as I will have been for the last few months or years of my life, basically like Stephen Hawking.
How is this different from any of the following which have been around for years?
http://www.deadmansswitch.net/
http://lastpost.com/
http://www.youdeparted.com/
http://www.letterfrombeyond.com/
http://mylastemail.com/
http://www.postexpression.com/
http://www.finalthoughts.com/
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
Fuck you, Fuck you, Fuck youuuuu, You're cool, fuck you. I'm out...
You know that mother has a sick mind if she's going to haunt her daughter's house every year just for the poor girl to tear-up all the furniture looking for a letter, then forget what she did. At least my mother learned she can scratch letters on my chest if she wants to speak to me. Just like when she was alive, except without the cigarette-butt punctuation.
Are you sure it wasn't a spoof message, like the one's eBay and Yahoo are guilty of sending?
Read most of your post and was enlightened to know I'm not the only one seaking the legal implications. This "death" mail thing sounds more like the signature necessary to confess one of his involvement in hurrying his own demise, and would thus perhaps be looked as evidence of fraud.
All the wills I've ever seen made have been from a guilt-trip trumped by overbearing delinquent well-educated greedy children looking to out-do one another's jealousy by demanding preferential treatment outside their equal share of inheritance. Rather than walk away as free men of equal standing, they'll allow the courts (foreigners) violate the Living Will by turning their property into the enumerated resale of a market and then demand a service charge to sell it back to them. In the end, who would realy appreciate the charity of carying such property tend to be hurried or bullied out of the way, and some poor ignorant creature that earned its squallor would hold the antique to widdle it down to less than fire kindling by misapplication.
I'm in favor of thee old Norse style of celebrations, where after a fine and paralyzing meal they load a little boot with him and her and their retinue, dooshed with petrol, pushed out to the middle of the sea where the courts can't claim "survivor" crap in the legal proclamations they'ld try to invade by, and then give a fine bottle of wine to whoever's arrow sets fire to it.
"brb lol!"
I would use a botnet operating through FreeNet and Gnutella, that would send a virus and a picture of my dick in everyone's Inbox that would look for someone's Avatar with OCR and superimpose this onto everyon's teeth so it looked like dickteeth. Then I would report all these new images to SOMTHINGAWFUL, get my cut of 10% sent to a PayPal account, then have the botnet buy and send copper wedding rings out to all the female girls found in the last picture hunt each with a return address to a random "John" from a U.S. Navy directory Pier business just so the conclusion wouldn't make much noise. Should be pandemonium and Hell anyway by the end of April.
In soviet Russia, corpse emails you! Oh wait...
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
This service isn't really offering anything new as far as I can tell. SlightlyMorbid.com offers a similar service, but also has options to have messages sent if you are injured or hospitalized or such in addition to death. Also, DeathSwitch.com offers to send messages after your death too, but instead of relying on trusted friends, it requires you to confirm that you are alive every so often. If you fail to respond for a certain period of time, your mail is sent. You can customize these time intervals. It even allows you to set up one message for one recipient completely free.
I mean, I wouldn't like my e-mail address being sold to telemarketers after I'm dead
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
I would sign up for this, if they gave an option of posting it as the first post under the "GNU/Hurd 1.0 Released" Slashdot story, when it happens.
I think it's silly to bet on a company to outlast you (unless you are in poor health or making risky life choices)
Back in the Bad Old pre-internet days, there was a thing called Ham Radio.
Quite cool actually, scream so loud in the RF spectrum that some proto-geek on the far side of the planet can hear you.
Anyhoo, in those distant days hams confirmed radio contact by exchanging postcards. Called them CQ cards if I remember correctly. Sort of a touch of something physical to go with the ethereal.
Well, my dad was one of those 1950'60's era radio hams.... but he died when I was young.
Strangely enough, about a year after he died, we received a CQ card confirming a contact made after his death...
I mean, it's not kind of like one meets one's demise--we really do. No sense in trying to lighten it up with some fun quote marks.
When I first read the title, I thought that someone hacked his peacemaker to send his bpm to a computer, then made a cron job to periodically check if it was beating, if not, it sent a email.
He says to send all my money to Nigeria.
It sounds like it doesn't add anything that cryptographic secret sharing (or splitting) can't provide.
Heh Heh...
for assholes/practical jokers... Perhaps I am just a sick bastard, but the first thing I thought of was to photoshop myself into several locals and every few years or so send out a email "I'm not dead, I am in Cancun!" accompanied by a picture. Then several days later "Just kidding, still dead..." Then several years later again "Gotcha, I am really in Canada eh!" etc...
If people hate me now, wait til I am dead. This would also be good for destroying your enemies from the grave with some well timed release of information. /evil.
I want a service that can post a month's worth of twitter updates..... August 16, 2009 12:02PM - Marilyn Monroe just hit on me. She's been hitting the bottle pretty hard this afternoon. Think I'll have Angel hair pasta for lunch. August 16, 2009 9:04PM - Saw James Cameron's Avatar. Heaven gets all the movies 12 months before they are released elsewhere. It rocks. Go and see it! August 17, 2009 5:05AM - MJ is at it again upstairs. The dude will NOT stop partying. I finally got to sleep at 3 this morning and damn if I wasn't woken up by the dude's trademark scream upstairs. I hit the ceiling with the broom but it did no good. Do I have to live with this for eternity?!?1 August 19, 2009 5:00PM - St John moved me next to Mother Teresa this morning. While quieter, I smell reefer coming from her room. Might go over then and ask for a toke. August 21 2009 8:00PM - God just finished up a rock concern this evening. Damn has she got some sweet rifts. Who knew!??
In the (hopefully) years and years before I die, what happens if this service goes out of business? And I've got my will / other critical files up there?
Maybe this backed by an insurance company and they'll cross sell that to you when you sign up?
An Illinois man left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida, where his wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him in Orlando the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick email. However, unable to find the scrap of paper on which he had written her email address, he did his best to type it from memory. Unfortunately, he missed one letter and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher's wife, whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her email, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream and fell to the floor in a dead faint, at the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:
Dearest Wife,
Just got checked in.
Everything's prepared for your arrival tomorrow!
P.S.
Sure is hot down here!
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
(No, I don't believe in any of this rapture stuff - it was just the story!)
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...