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.

Comments

Yahoo

[TheRealMindChild]

Wait until Yahoo! mail shuts down. So many website accounts will be toast

Interesting...

[sycodon]

Email addresses have almost become the equivalent of a physical address. All your bills can come to it,all your correspondence, almost every business asks for it, some even require it. This has been encouraged by internet providers in a sense (they'll want your email address too). I wouldn't be surprised t learn that there is significance legally in contracts and other agreements.

So now you have people who have setup much of their life around an email address in pretty much the same way they've done with their physical address and it has become an integral part of their life and business.

Forcing a user to relinquish an address for whatever reason is kind of like a city renaming your street or changing your house number. I wonder what that does to legal devices such as mortgages, etc. Is mail still delivered or does it come back as invalid address? How long does it take for the address change to percolate it's way through the system? Will SWAT show up at the wrong house (again)? Will emergency services not find your place?

I bet some lawyer could make a go at this.