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Customer's 20-Year-Old Email Account Shut Down Over Unusual Address (www.cbc.ca)
A Halifax man is facing the daunting task of going through almost two decades of email messages after his email provider served notice it was deactivating his account in 30 days because of his email address: noreply@eastlink.ca. From a report: "I had it since the late '90s, probably 1998 when I really started getting online," Steve Morshead told CBC News. "I asked for it, it was available and they gave it to me without hesitation." He said he picked the handle "noreply" because he wanted an unusual address -- and back in the '90s, it was. Morshead never expected to lose his email address, which he uses for communicating with everyone from friends to banks to lawyers. He is in the process of selling his home and says this couldn't come at a worse time. "My email address is a personal identifier for banks, eBay, Kijiji, and hundreds of other places I've logged into -- so many I can't count," Morshead said. He said he wouldn't be in this situation if Eastlink had addressed the issue when he applied for the email. "Now, after all these years, 20 years almost, I find it reprehensible they want to pop out of bushes and just give me 30 days to go through 20 years worth of emails and decide what I want to keep," he said. Morshead said he was given 30 days notice on June 7 that he would lose access to his email address and all of his emails.
Something like this happened to me. My email address was with a company called "Lavabit." Except they didn't give me 30 days, they shut down with 0 notice. After they shut down, they even lied to us, saying that our emails were safe, that they were having technical problems and would be back up in a couple of days.
It was a huge mess, I would have appreciated 30 days, but I still would have been upset like this guy.
It's a good thing he did keep them, because now he knows who he's communicated with and what accounts he has linked to it. He can inform the various people/services of the change.
Digital data isn't the same. As long as you're not paying for storage space it's not worth the time to delete it - old emails certainly don't get in the way of reading new emails and their contents often times can come in handy.
That said - 30 days is plenty of time to setup a new account and use an IMAP transfer utility to migrate every single message - even if it is 20 years worth. It's also plenty of time to change all of his online accounts for services (about 6 months ago I decided to switch primary email addresses and I was able to list and transfer every account I could think of within 2 evenings).
The only real problem would be personal acquaintances that contact him via that address. In that case though I'd setup an "out of office" or the equivalent immediately and just have it respond with a message indicating that his address will be changing soon.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I'm not sure why 30 days is problematic. Nor do I understand the claim that he's going to lose his mail. He says the company won't help, while they say they've offered to help.
In any case, migrating email from one IMAP server to another is simple. And, if it's still POP3 for some reason, anything he wants is already on his computer - nothing needs to be downloaded.
Heck, Gmail has a tool that'll do exactly this for both protocols, doesn't it?
#DeleteChrome
"I just want to tell people be aware that your email address may not be your own,"
If you want an email you own, register a domain and use that.
From Eastlink consumer terms and conditions
7. Your telephone numbers and identifiers
7.1 You do not own any identifier (e.g. telephone, account, calling card or PIN number; email, IP or Web page address; access code, etc.) assigned to you, and we may change or remove any identifier at any time upon notice to you and we will in no way be required to compensate you for such changes. You are permitted to use (but not register with any organization) only those IP addresses we have provided to you.
Those conditions are from 2014 but you can be sure there were similar provisions back in 1998. Probably back as far as Eastlink has been providing telephone service in the 70s.
It was never "your" email address Steve
I've set up my mail system to auto-delete anything that comes from noreply@*
I use mail to communicate, not to be told things.
It's just bad manners if companies only want to talk and not listen.
It's a creimer post. It rarely makes sense, but it has Amazon affiliate link spam.
The idiot part is that he hasn't figured out he can archive his existing email, send a 'change of address' notice to important contacts and basically be spam-free for a few months.