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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.
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.
what an email packrat, reminds me of those hoarders that fill their house from wall to wall & floor to ceiling with every piece of junk they find even if they have no use for it or just a piece of junk,
i dont keep email longer than a week or two, when i am finished with it i delete it,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
trade it for abuse@eastlink.ca
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.
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?
. .
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
Wait until Yahoo! mail shuts down. So many website accounts will be toast
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
"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
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 print, therefore I am.
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 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.
He is in the process of moving all of his email to Yahoo's servers. Should be good for another 20, right???
If you're serious about EMAIL, you absolutely must get your own domain name. Yes, you'll have to pay to register the domain, and for SMTP/IMAP hosting. It's not expensive.
I have limited sympathy for people using an ISP's domain for important EMAIL. ISP's are frequently incompetent, insolvent, and/or evil. Any of those situations can result in the permanent loss of your EMAIL address with little or no notice. If you own your domain, you can move it to a different hosting service whenever the need arises.
Trump disagrees.
One of my domains seems to fly under the radar, but it has 2-4 curse words depending on how religious you are. Had it for about 20 years now...
If it wasn't for character length, I would love to shift my main email address back to my own domain names... but securing things properly is a pain.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
20 year old yahoo! account down the tubes.
Was the only one still active after the era when all the providers switched to 30 days or we delete on free acounts a decade or so back.
I have actually given up email as a media as a result. Everything I need is done via IRC or XMPP now and if others don't have it, I don't need to associate with them.
Wasn't that where the long-standing vanity plate GRABHER, the owner's name, was suddenly classified as a gender slur?
Please... Just download all of it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Be nice but the POP3 option is the second best. I remember when Nokia mail quit and I had to move everything over. I believe I used a forwarding feature till everything was cleaned out. I also remember when a mail service by Novell up and left about eight years back. That was a pain but at least they had archives.
donotreply@eastlink.ca
This kind of situation is one reason for running a personal email server. You can still run everything through the main mail provider, the local is for backup, features, and integration if you have multiple accounts.
I remember back when Aol bought Netscape they took my netscape.net email address and gave it to the aim user with the same name. I hope the office troll who came up with that plan died of scabies.
I still won.
probably they hired a Pottering devotee. Someone who blew a gasket at seeing "do-not-reply@" email in all their bulk mail systems, internal monitoring systems, etc., and threw a bit of a fit about it and how it should be just "noreply@" instead, and then wait what a luser customer has been using it? and it went to 11 at that point.
Not to mention as long as they're online the ISP is granted more and more permissions to them as our freedoms are lost, and they become a liability more than convenience
You toss important e-mails too? I keep all for about a year and only keep the important ones forever when still needed.
I keep all of my e-mails - STORED LOCALLY, on my hard drive (and backed up like the rest of my data). My ISP provided email account is just a transport. Once my client grabs the e-mail it is deleted from the remote server. Now it's under my control. This is very easy to do with most any modern e-mail client.
Is this really so uncommon?
Any news on his mothers maiden name?
...you're at the mercy of the people who do.
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.
I just want to tell people be aware that your email address may not be your own
Yep, they all but said they wanted the address for themselves. It is pure and simple bullying for sure.
And I suspect their entire offer to help was also spelt out as telling him what he has to do (Lots of tedious work for him) rather than them actually doing anything for him.
Typical asshole corporate action.
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.
Well this is somewhat a funny story. However, you just download all your mail to your PC with your email client. Then you get a new email account and move up all the mails to that. However, if the mail system has only a website frontend then this might be complicated. Anyway, the provider could provide an image with all the mails.
This isn't hard.
Install Thunderbird and download it all. The last time I installed Tbird after an Ubuntu reinstall I told it my email address AND IT FIGURED OUT ALL THE REST. Pop3, Imap, whatever, all it needed from me was the address and password. Win.
You should NEVER leave the only copy of all your email on some cloud server, even if you're paying; the company can get hacked, flooded, bankrupt, or whatever. Download it, backup to detached storage, cloud provider, or whatever. You can leave a copy in the cloud if you don't care who sees it, but you should have copies you control.
Sucks to lose your email address though, that's a lot of people and institutions to remember and update in a month.
originally my login here was @10u8 until that stopped letting me login because suddenly the slashdot id became an e-mail address and the new code would not tolerate my old id
What's wrong with unusual email addresses? I kinda like mine: bitch@completeunix.com
If Pottering was involved, noreply@ would be a synonym for root@
If I had seen this 15 years ago, I would have made them change his address. Oops.
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.
If you set the reply email address of automatic messages as "noreply@eastlink.ca", some people will reply there. It's unavoidable.
For example, someone may use password recovery, get the recovery link, and email "thanks" back before changing the password. If the "noreply" address is some random person's address, he will have a chance of compromising the account.
It just isn't acceptable for that to be possible on a consumer level service. "Require users to be less stupid" is not a solution for security matters.
I have some sympathy for this guy, but mail addresses aren't for life. My ISP merged and decided to get rid of individual accounts and be B2B only. Gave us 30 days notice, which was more than reasonable. It simply wasn't that big a deal.
If he has it, he can impersonate official-looking emails from eastlink.ca.
The real point is not "Don't trust other companies", "The cloud isn"t what you think it is" and so on. The real point is this - Man chooses stupid, ill advised, misleading email name at a domain he doesn't control and then gets upset when domain owners take away his name. Honestly, I don't know why he hasn't been getting crap from people for 20 years on the use of "noreply" in his email. Some of us do actually pay attention to that.
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.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I can imagine a worse case.
A new password recovery system gets implemented by Eastlink. When a user goes through the forgotten password process, they receive an email with a link that takes them to a page where they can enter a new password. Unfortunately, the people responsible for the drafting the requirements for this email aren't aware that 'noreply' is a user's account and use that as the originator of the recovery email. Also unfortunately, some people reply to these emails, quoting them, giving this user the change password link.
Not using an email address that belongs to one of their customers for outbound emails would be a good start. There are so many substitutes you can use. Even as simple as no-reply instead of noreply will work fine. When sending outbound email with a no reply address, it has to be appear as a real delivery address to some mail servers before they'll even accept the email.
If you want to accept replies despite sending from a no reply email, you set the Reply-To: header and most email clients will use that address.
If eastlink goes out of business, I guess that would be OK then, it's only if they want to keep from going out of business by upgrading their software, it's an issue. I've had old addresses that went away because the companies who owned the domains went belly-up and stopped paying for those domains--or sold them to people who decided to use them for some other purpose. Get used to it, emails on SEDs (Someone Else's Domain) are subject to unexpected change.
They have no right. One of their products, what he pays for, is email with an address that he chose and they approved.
That's all there is. When they actually disconnect him there's a big chance he'll win a huge amount if he goes to court.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
And by that I mean I should be able to hit "reply" on any email I receive and expect someone will read it.
I find it especially full of hypocrisy when I get an email from noreply@corporation.com ending with "don't hesitate to contact us".
Yeah sure, if you wanted me to contact you, you wouldn't be using a noreply email address in the first place.
Even if all his messages are stored online (unlikely), it's not about downloading them which is what comments seem to be focusing on. As everyone else has noted, there are tons of options for downloading or migrating your messages.
The bigger issue is all the places where he's either using that email address as a login (particularly ones where there's no provision for changing userid/email address) and the sites that he's registered on with some other ID but which also use that email address for messages, account recovery, etc. There's no real big technical issue with identifying and changing logins on those sites except that it's likely to be a hell of a lot of work under a deadline when he's already unusually busy (normal work + house purchase + "Cripes, now THIS???") and there's no real shortcut for the manual part of that.
fencepost
just a little off
Guess what, the email headers are easily forged and they, the spammers, can use any email address they want. I get quite a number of spam emails that are using my own email address. So Eastlink needing noreply is really rather silly.
If it's that important to you -- it gets you into banks, you store decades of personal stuff in it -- then you should be owning it, not renting it. Doesn't cost much to own a domain name.
Uh, yeah. Of course it's not "your own" if you don't run your own email server and have your own domain. How can anyone not understand this?
What Eastlink is doing is absolutely ridiculous, for sure. They are worried about people sending messages to a "noreply" address? Huh? Isn't that the whole point, that messages sent there won't receive a reply or even be looked at? And who would even think of manually typing in an address like that to send a message to? Unless they are using it as a from address for their own correspondence, in which case it would be entirely their fault. In that case, I think the customer would be entitled to file a complain t against Eastlink for potentially flooding his inbox with garbage!
he's not losing emails. that problem is easy to solve.
losing the address is a pain but if he hasn't already put an auto-responder on his current address notifying of his new address he should really do that fast. he should also go and change the email address on all his important accounts that use that email addy.
Eastlink should give him 90 days though. 30 seems a bit stingy.
If I got an email from noreply1@eastlink.ca, there's no way I would reply to it. Hence, mission accomplished.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Is that companies still do this "don't reply to this email" stupidity. No email, automated or not should be sent with a no reply from or reply-to address. You should encourage customers to reply to emails if they require support, that's just good customer service.
Stop the whining and sue the bastards.
Nuff said.
> 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.
What difference does it make? Any moron can make any email address and name appear anywhere at any bloody time they please.
You are the moron for thinking that there is *ever* any "trustworthiness" whatsoever associated with an email address. Unless of course the email address resides on a properly configured server -- and there is only 1 or 2 of those on the entire solar system. One happens to be mine.
eastlink.ca certainly does not have any. Nor does any other Telco, CableCo, or FreeMail provider.
Yep, they all but said they wanted the address for themselves. It is pure and simple bullying for sure.
And I suspect their entire offer to help was also spelt out as telling him what he has to do (Lots of tedious work for him) rather than them actually doing anything for him.
Typical asshole corporate action.
Cases like this show the insight of services that looked like jerks for reserving a secondary domain for their client addresses back in the day.
I always hated being limited to verizon.NET, or gmail.com (instead of GOOGLE). I mean, sometimes you want to have the prestige of the original organization especially if you want to flaunt your harvard.edu address, right?
Snow Crash: A Novel by Neal Stephenson https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FBJCJE
Second just because noreply is in the name does not mean that people won't send replies there.
My point is that email replies to this address would be solicited. I wouldn't go out of my way to think. hmmm I need to contact eastlink, the best way would be to go to noreply@eastlink.ca. That would be incredibly stupid, and likewise who cares if people then accidentally send an email to some address with the specific purpose that it wouldn't be read anyway.
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.
Zero, because the reply to address on email is not a controlled element and should never be used to judge for scams. You are FAR more likely to get phishing emails at a legitimate noreply@eastlink.ca. But you know what you're not likely to ever happen to you? Getting scammed by replying to an email address called noreply, because why the hell would a scammer monitor an email address for something he expressly doesn't want a reply to.
This is pure bullshit!
He's already been granted it, and has been using it just fine for decades.
I'll bet it is just another totally incompetent middle manager that saw this and went anal over it!
This just more proof if an idiotic, uneducated pool of humans! Get off your high horse, bozo!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.