Slashdot Mirror
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.
I suppose 20 years ago "noreply@" wasn't really standardized as an email bit bucket for domains, so I'll give him a pass on that, but yes, in general it really doesn't seem a suitable email address today. It will be some work, but get a new address, update all the important services and move on. Want to actually own an email address, buy a domain and host it with a company with email service. That's the only guarantee.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Pray you never get divorced, sued, have a need to sue someone else, audited, or are suspected of a crime.
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 keeps them all online? Does his provider not have a pop3 option to download everything he has been hoarding on their servers and sort from there at his own leisure?
. .
Well, aren't you special? So...because you can keep email organized, everybody should be able to? Just because you don't need old emails, no one else should?
I just did a quick boo at Eastlink's website and no where are there guidelines for email handles.
Maybe if the handle meant something different 20 years ago than it does now they could come back and say something, but I suspect the real reason is that "noreply@eastlink.ca" is a damn useful email address for eastlink.ca
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Once again, someone finds out the hard way that "the cloud" means "someone else's servers."
Of course, I don't expect him to run his own mail server. That's a bit of a technical challenge. But I do expect people to continue to suffer from putting their stuff on other people's servers.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've got emails going back over 20 years.
I bet a lot of other people here do as well.
Being able to pull up an email thread from years ago has been useful on numerous occasions.
You can try to sell me on wasting my time picking through and sorting email, but it ain't happening. It stays in the inbox forever, and storage is dirt cheap. If I run out of Gmail space, I'll drag everything into a new archive using a IMAP client and start fresh. If I need to find something - anything - I can just search the huge pile. Need to fill out that apartment address from 5 moves ago on a lease application? No problem. Want to email aunt Martha and for some reason didn't put her email into your address book? No problem. Want to see that picture you sent mom of you and your brother with grandma? No problem. Hell, you can even read your Best Buy spam from 1996 if you are so inclined.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
OK, so why the hell can't Eastlink just rename the account or move the emails over to the new account? (for that matter, so can this guy with a few clicks...)
I doubt that's the problem -- it's that he's used that email address to register for other services for the past 20 years, and he may not remember to update his contact info /recovery address on every single one of possibly hundreds of other websites like gmail, expedia, his bank, his cable company, netflix, xbox live, Steam, EA, etc. until it may be too late.
Very easy to overlook a few of those, and depending on the site in question you may be screwed if you don't think about them until the 30 day transition has passed.
So sayeth the elitist asshole who doesn't grok that not everyone is as tech savvy as you
Thank god for Trump and North Korea -- Ignorant and Arrogant Elitists such yourself are about to disappear en mass
Most of us "tech savvy elitists" don't really know how to do a given task, either. What we know how to do is look it up and apply step-by-step instructions. If that doesn't work, maybe then we'll ask for help. Then, others are more willing to help you because then you're showing respect for their time and you're not just being lazy. They tend to respect that you want to learn and be shown how instead of demanding to be coddled.
It's "elitist" now to expect someone to Google a topic with obvious search terms and then apply very simple (typically illustrated) step-by-step instructions? It's "arrogant" to expect him to ask the company (the old one or a new one) "how would I migrate the e-mails to another account, got any simple ideas?" That requires "tech savvy", really? I don't see how it requires anything more than basic literacy. It certainly requires less time than contacting the media and convincing them to make it into a news story.
I guess you drive a car and have no idea how to change a tire, right, because that would require a "mechanical expert"? Clearly that's exactly the same thing as rebuilding an engine or repairing a transmission, right? Do you really want to validate the idea that a grown man with no diagnosed mental retardation just plain can't handle this? In order to what, justify your own laziness and lack of initiative? That's the world you want? Think carefully about that.
donotreply@eastlink.ca
The email he needs is noreply@his_own_domain_name.whatever_TLD_he_chooses.
Using your provider's domain name is going to mess you up sooner or later, most typically when you move house.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I can't imagine spending an iota of effort or time worrying about someone else's username. The phrase "get a life" comes to mind.
but I suspect the real reason is that "noreply@eastlink.ca" is a damn useful email address for eastlink.ca
Why? The express purpose of that email is to catch those you don't want to talk to. There's no difference between making it noreply@eastlink.ca vs noanswer@eastlink.ca, noreply1@eastlink.ca, no.reply@eastlink.ca
By it's nature they aren't expecting people to use it so what's so valuable about the specific name? I understand webmaster@eastlink.ca has a general pattern for people who want to contact someone, but what's the pattern if you don't want to contact anyone? Worst case this dude ends up with some really stupid spam from rely stupid people.
Why would anyone want to keep that address anyway? I would think it would cause all sorts of problems with people assuming that it was an unmonitored account. I don't have a lot of sympathy.
No, I don't expect you do. It seems to be a common misconception here that it is somehow 'tough' to be uncaring and express you contempt for the plight of others. The fact that you haven't got the courage to show your face, but post as an AC, suggests that you are not really all that tough.
But back to the question: If you have 20 years' worth of important contacts, who have your email address, then you have plenty of good reasons for not wanting to change that address. Figuring out who has your address and who is important is very hard work, which you would know if you had ever had to do it. and getting everybody to change the contact details they have for you is even worse. Should he have chosen a better name back then? Perhaps - but he didn't and it has worked for 20 years, so what is your point actually? His ISP could let him continue using this address without breaking into a sweat, and it is not actually their business interfering in what kind of imagine their customers want to impress on their contacts - they are in the wrong, simply.
By it's nature they aren't expecting people to use it so what's so valuable about the specific name?
First it looks official enough for phishing, which is something they might want to prevent. Second just because noreply is in the name does not mean that people won't send replies there.
There's no difference between making it noreply@eastlink.ca vs noanswer@eastlink.ca, noreply1@eastlink.ca, no.reply@eastlink.ca
I would be quite suspicious if I got an email from noreply1@eastlink.ca and you should be too, that you list it as acceptable makes me wonder for how many scam mails you fell this year alone.
I guess he got the address around the time you were born. Those of us who were on the internet when he got the address can tell you that no, there was no "standard" (which it's not) of putting noreply in the local part of the address to indicate that replies were not wanted. People back then mostly adhered to proper standards, not bogus customs invented when marketdroids discovered the net. It was, and should still be, a perfectly good address.
May we live long and die out