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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.
trade it for abuse@eastlink.ca
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.
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.
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
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
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'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 think he's brilliant
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???
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.
Pray you never get divorced, sued, have a need to sue someone else, audited, or are suspected of a crime.
Ah, but now his retention policy is on-record and SLASHDOT will be responsible for it.
The guy is saved from any subpoenas.
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.
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.
I keep all of my email because it takes no physical space and I might need/want to search for a particular bit of information in them.
That's what this guy should do. Set up an IMAP client and download everything.
Ironic comment considering the name of this website.
Should you wish to insult, do so properly. Trump, like Hillary, best serve themselves by having no records at all.
Now I shall wipe my memory of you away, like with a cloth.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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,
Windows came and I started using Forte Agent at .98 and I've used nothing else, I've been using that program when or before running Win98 Or NT/W2K, and keeping my Emal for some odd reason. I have that email from 1998 and almost every one received as well as all i sent out . I can't really explain why unless it's an example of never having to install Agent other than that first time after it's pulling an Icon to the desktop (Agent installed on Drive D).
Maybe keeping them was because of (forget hierarchy Alt.~.Microsoft.nt.misc (?) that was one fun times on Usenet, very helpful group. Just a bunch of users given a new OS and sharing tips and tricks with each other. (Microsoft sent anyone who asked NT - having a Win95 client/Outlook server/ Exchange Server/SP2 - being important we all had it within two days hot rush (I had asked many months earlier)) Nobody above the others and it was all about shareing, tricks I learned at that time I still use to this day - the who cares type: a selection isn't selected until you release the mouse key - the open a clear run command 15 paths in grab a file and drop it in the run command you will have the entire path to file (I use this one a lot and was told of it way back then.
Whatever the reason (the above was reminiscing that hated to quit. I have them all, one would think it a huge security risk legal as well as personal if all are stolen. Not what I post or email about :) drives have been imaged by one looking to screw me :) nothing came about it.
True facts. 1998 Email upon request, headers only if of a personal nature.
being important we all had it within two days hot rush
To explain we were all normal Joe's, That offering from Microsoft told me MS wanted me to have all it's OS's money not being a requirement. and my line since that time (I've still got that 4 disk set) for whatever reason...
What if you're not serious about email?
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!”
Besides, if it's really important I'm sure the NSA has a copy of it somewhere.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
donotreply@eastlink.ca
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.
You toss important e-mails too? I keep all for about a year and only keep the important ones forever when still needed.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Could you maybe elaborate on why that pissed them off?
david, david2, david3, david4, da5id...wtf?! who does this noob think he is?!
Also, why does it matter if he's a graphic artist?
Programmers thought the graphic artists were a bunch of assholes. Graphic artists thought the programmers were a bunch of assholes. I managed to gain the respect of both teams from my hard work as the intern.
Could you maybe elaborate on why that pissed them off?
david, david2, david3, david4, da5id...wtf?! who does this noob think he is?!
Also, why does it matter if he's a graphic artist?
Programmers thought the graphic artists were a bunch of assholes. Graphic artists thought the programmers were a bunch of assholes. I managed to gain the respect of both teams from my hard work as the intern.
Doesn't make sense, they should have started at david0
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?
Like registering fuck.com - maybe you get rich, maybe you just get burned - you know you're playing on the edge.
"i dont keep email longer than a week or two, when i am finished with it i delete it,"
We understand. You don't have a real world life, and would like to forget any of the embarrassing social interactions you've had. Especially if they happened over a week ago.
But, surprising as it may seem to you, some others actually have a meaningful existence and and would like to document it.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Doesn't make sense, they should have started at david0
That really depended on the IT department, as there were no best practices for usernames 20 years ago. The first David would almost always use "david" as the username. The next David would either get "david1" or "david2" (it was "david2" at Fujitsu). The fifth David is usually the smart ass out of the bunch, as I've seen a few "da5id" over the years.
"and likes mangina"
FTFY
I'm sure they all respected the fat man wearing a corset and "formal" sneakers, who has never had sex, has an AA degree, lives in a studio apartment, is a member of a weird Christian cult, and likes manga.
Twenty years ago in 1997... I wore white New Balance training shoes as the dress code at Fujitsu was blue jeans and t-shirts. I got my first AA degree in 1994 and the second AA degree came in 2007. I was living in three-bedroom apartment with five other guys. Because we belonged to the same church, we took care of another roommate who had Lou Gehrig's disease and he died in April 2000 after his 39th birthday. After I left the church and got my studio apartment in 2005, I got into manga.
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'm sure they all respected the fat man wearing a corset and "formal" sneakers, who has never had sex, has an AA degree, lives in a studio apartment, is a member of a weird Christian cult, and likes manga.
Twenty years ago in 1997... I wore white New Balance training shoes as the dress code at Fujitsu was blue jeans and t-shirts. I got my first AA degree in 1994 and the second AA degree came in 2007. I was living in three-bedroom apartment with five other guys. Because we belonged to the same church, we took care of another roommate who had Lou Gehrig's disease and he died in April 2000 after his 39th birthday. After I left the church and got my studio apartment in 2005, I got into manga.
Thank you for the explanation. So, what month and year did you get into spamming Slashdot with your Amazon affiliate links?
So do I, but I don't keep the only copy on my ISP's e-mail server.
I don't get if he's mad about losing the address or losing the mails. But if it's the latter, he's an idiot, since you can just drag them across between servers if you have a decent mail client that supports IMAP.
If he had them in something like an AOL database file, then he might deserve some sympathy. Holy hell, the local database for the Mac version was "designed" by a madman.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Reading the article and having the tiniest bit of empathy, its quite obvious he's mad about the former, losing the address, as now he has to go through 20 years worth of contact communication and account data and transition everyone and all the services involved. My 1Password has 2800 sets of credentials the majority of which are associated to the same email address. If that suddenly was taken away from me that's 2800 password resets I can't do, 2800 accounts I can't confirm ownership of via email.. 2800 headaches.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
ISP's in Canada were often merging, going tits up or changing business models. For him not to anticipate this over a decade ago is retarded. He's selling his house. If he plans on moving to another city, did he think Eastlink operates everywhere? Thinking he'll have exact same ISP all this time is also stupid.
You're the snarky one, asshole. You can't see usefulness in timestamped information? You're fucking dumb. Just fuck right off.
I do to, but only a sadist or retard would still be tied to an ISP based email address in this day and age. can't feel any sympathy for someone that has let themselves get into such a situation.
Same here, there's a great many times in business where it has come in handy, and a few in my personal life as well. Storage space is cheap, searches are fast!
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
You just need to be careful what you keep. It is perfectly acceptable to tell a court or police, sorry I only keep 12 months of email if they want your history. But if you keep everything for 20 years then they can demand it all. never know when that can get you in the poo, e.g. my parents divorce involved court orders to hand over 2 decades of email history as they too kept everything. many other unexpected scenarios can happen from Tax Audits to criminal investigations that can suddenly see your entire personal history handed over.
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.
That is a double edged sword. keeping the email when sued/investigated/audited means they can get it. Many people say dumb stuff in email to family and friends that can easily be misinterpreted by a 3rd party when they are looking for something. If you are going to keep it and those items you mentioned are a fear then you need to ensure everything you say in email is something that can't be taken the wrong way.
I just want to tell people be aware that your email address may not be your own
Omg, is his name "dead mouse" or "dead mauve" ?
Why would anyone want to keep that address anyway?
If he'd have copyrighted it, he could be shakin' down a whole lotta people. Just sayin'.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
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.
If I still had some moderator points I would mod this up.
Who cares what someone else's user name is? Only the petty and the spiteful.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
That is kind of impressive, actually. I retained none of that. I don't have all sorts of things that were once considered valuable, to me at least. I don't even have copies of many of my papers, almost none of my old programs, and very little source code. I don't even have all my old text books, journals, or even copies of stuff I published.
I am impressed that you've managed to keep that stuff. There's a slim chance that I have some of that, but I'm not even sure which drive(s) would be the best place(s) to start.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
You'd rather be at the whim of a non ISP based email because nothing will EVER happen to them? right?
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,
Define hording. My 20 year old email collection is still smaller than a high-def movie.
It's less hording and more like storing important stuff. As for you deleting everything after 2 weeks, if I did that I likely would have been fined during my last tax audit. Or ... do you print out all your emails so you don't need to horde the bits and a too easily searchable manner?
I used to, but my webhost SmarterASP.NET decided to store their backups on the same SAN as the actual data, so I now have no emails. You are either extremely OCD and manually archive anything important or don't use your email for anything noteworthy that you want to keep for future reference.
Hydraulic pizza oven!! Guided missile! Herring sandwich! Styrofoam! Jayne Mansfield! Aluminum siding! Borax!
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.
Hell, you can even read your Best Buy spam from 1996 if you are so inclined.
Pine has an export command?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
you don't have to be at the Whim of a non ISP based one to fix the problem idiot. spend $50, buy a domain name and have mail routed to your ISP. This protects you from them being bought, going broke or you simply moving. alternatively route your mail via a webmail service (again preferably from your owned domain). being at the whim of any provider when easy technical solutions exist is moronic.
Your 1998 emails available on request? Yeah, that's what everyone here has just been dying to do, read all your 20 year old emails. Thank you SO much for the opportunity! I love wasting time reading emails from a random stranger on the internet, how did you know???m
Obviously it's Dead Mau V, the 5th Dead Mau. What I don't get is why they say it's dead when it seems he's still alive and kicking.
spend $50, buy a domain name and have mail routed to your ISP.
And then what 3 years later once your $50 domain will have expired? Is it yet another expense to renew until you die?
"Who cares what someone else's user name is?"
Those of us who like to keep track of idiocy, spammers, scammers, and frauds on this site.
Because a 5 is not a v.
The Romans would disagree.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
yes, is that really such a massive cost for something so fucking critical in this day and age?
Was "fucking" necessary?
Are you claiming that every man, woman, and child in the developed world ought to own a personal domain?
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
not sure who you use, 3 years for $50 is at the pricier end of town, personally I pay $45 for 5 years. regardless even at your inflated price that is all of $17 a year for unlimited email addresses that you can route to any account anywhere at anytime and that is assuming you don't use the domains for anything else worthwhile. For something that I rely upon for so many services nowadays that is chicken feed compared to the effort of changing should my provider go tits up or my account get compromised/blocked for some reason. 2 years ago when I decided gmail sucked balls I had my mail routing to outlook.com in under an hour, should I get fed up with some change their I can reroute it to anyone else I like at zero extra cost, so I get all the benefits of whatever provider I am using without the risk of being locked into them, seems a cheap price to pay to remove the potential nightmare of an address change,
I own a domain through Gandi. So does one of my cousins. I'm not aware of anyone else in my family who does. I concede that my family is too small of a sample for any rigorous statistical inference, but I'm curious as to how many others in the developed world understand the benefits of owning a domain.
Thank you. What is your domain?
We have the same problem, Zathros liked his email address, my brother Zathros liked his, my other brother Zathros wanted to keep his also, our law firm Zathros, Zathros and Zathros was a mess for email , Sheridan was most displeased!
personally I use namesilo.com (cheap with free privacy and with built in templates for routing your mail for no extra charge) I would say most don't understand the benefits, that doesn't make it any less important. Most simply aren't aware of how cheap and easy it is but many will tell you the agony of going through a house move or ISP change and having to get access to everything again. everyone in my family has their own domain and I am the only one that is technical but after explaining it to parents, brothers etc I walked them through setting up their own years ago.
Be nice and just create sub-domains for them. It is free and you can create as many as you want!
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Why didn't you just create sub-domains for them?
It cost nothing like in free beer.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Yes! It is called: cp
I am still using pine, well alpine now, great tool and secure too. My emails get moved to relevant folders automatically once read. I have about 75 folders:
google, family, paypal, recruters, etc.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Well, I delete cat pictures and stupid videos people send me to somehow save on disk space. I keep most emails although.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
We'll see how 'meaningful' your existence is when you snuff it and your 50 years of obsessively stored emails documenting your 'meaningful existence' are flushed down the wazoo with the press of a key by some relative keen to have your laptop. Yes, nobody gives a fuck about your emails but you; when you're gone nobody is going to be poring over them, rifling through them trying to piece together your illustrious and unforgettable existence. They'll be deleted and forgotten before your coffin lid is closed. Save them the bother and delete as you go I say!
So the only person that doesnt have a copy of your emails is you. good plan.....Its like when i erase my call history on my phone, all im really doing is denying myself access to it, not anyone else.
Good-bye
Damn, you've got your work cut out for you there, you must be at it 24/7.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
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
Yes, his solution seems pretty universal, planned and designed to handle any possible case that may arise.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
WTF are you babbling on about?
Buy stuff over the Internet and get receipts via email. Receipt, date of purchase for warranty claim, documented. Someone at work asks via email that some job be done in a certain way. Later there's an issue because of how it was done. Documented.
There are lots of examples of why someone with a real life might want to keep emails around, completely unrelated to their death. But you're obviously not someone whose life has any significance.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
No. The confusion was all the baggage in the explanation.
It mattered that it was the fifth David.
It mattered that he was a graphic artist.
It mattered that people are assholes.
It mattered that it was 1997.
It mattered that it's Creimer.
And, most confusingly, it mattered whether I read "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson.
By the way, the letters 'D' and 'i' are also Roman numerals. Are we to assume the employee was actually called "Five-hundred-a-five-one-five-hundred"?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
That was my first reaction as well. Ask Mr. Nissan how hard he had to fight to keep his own.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
What? You told me you loved my cat pictures! Mr. Frizzles is funny. You said to yourself.
Now I see how you are. Well no more feline beauty pageants for you mister.
And I'm going to tell Frankie to stop sending his skateboarding while drunk videos too. Once he's out of the hospital, of course.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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.
it's a roman numeral joke? it seems a bit s15050y to me.
sag
And then you put an onion in your belt?
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.
The problem isn't the accounts you can think of. The problem is the accounts you don't. According to Murphy's Law, I would remember several important accounts on Day 31.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Nope my life has no significance. Neither does yours - you just haven't realised it yet.
You don't need anything fancy - even Thunderbird will do. Just create an offline folder and drag your IMAP stuff in.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes, one with Babylon 5.
You jest, but I switched to Eudora at some point in the 90s, which happily used my existing Pine folders. Then maybe 10 years later Gmail got IMAP and I dragged all of my Eudora mail into Gmail.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You missed this:
still run everything through the main mail provider, the local is for backup
I do the same. I use my provider for SMTP, but proxy everything to a local Dovecot server for access. It's the best of both worlds.
I agree that running your own outbound server is next to impossible these days.
Is there a next one in the queue? Because "DaVIid" would totally mess this up.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
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.
Are we to assume the employee was actually called "Five-hundred-a-five-one-five-hundred"?
That would be "Internal Server Error a Gateway Timeout" for you webdevs out there.
. Graphic artists thought the programmers were a bunch of assholes. I managed to gain the respect of both teams from my hard work as the intern.
This sounds like something an asshole would say.
And, most confusingly, it mattered whether I read "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson.
It was so clumsily wedged in there that I nearly laughed out loud. That looks like an affiliate link. Pretty desperate stuff.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.
I don't believe for a second that they did get annoyed. It is more likely that the anecdote is about 88% bollocks.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Keep track of the rest instead, smaller job.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.
noreply@ is probably the least spammed address - I bet most spam lists remove it in an automatic pass. I can see why he wants to keep it...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Da5id = DaVid.
That is the answer for actually pronouncing the name.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/57071/is-there-any-guidance-on-how-to-pronounce-da5id-from-snow-crash
This sounds like something an asshole would say.
Which is why I work in IT today.
Who cares what someone else's user name is
As someone who has had to try and match up user's real name with their user name as part of a system migration, I care. When "Johnson, Robert Francis" turns into frank.johson@whatever.com it makes things a significant pain in the ass. I hate that my IT department allows nicknames on user names.
Allowing Da5id because it's "cool" or "edgy" (is it really though) is just dumb. One could also argue that having to resort to david1 through 4 is also dumb, if I have to e-mail Dave Johnson, is he David1, David2, David3, David4, ore Da5id?
Outside of a work environment, I'm 99% on board. Could care less if someone goes by David5554882, DavidJonson, NoReply, or Da5id,
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.
If you're worried about that, then relying on your ISP to hold mail records is probably not the best idea. I know tons who have lost mail or accounts, and they don't really have any guarantees that they'll hold the data indefinitely.
If you want the old mail, connect with POP3, such it down into a box you own, and archive it.
You can even move mail between ISP's by setting up two IMAP accounts and copying from one to another (or POP3 to IMAP).
Also, 20 years ago or even 10 IMAP was not nearly so common as it is now. Around a decade ago the first iPhone came out, and arguably smartphones were one of the major things that started the push for IMAP versus POP3.
Prior to that, I'd be surprised if he was getting his mail by IMAP and not a POP3 account with Outlook Express, Thunderbird, or something else similar.
He once found a dead mouse in his computer while working as a programmer. Later when his musical career took off, he adopted deadmau5 as his stage name.
As a security measure to prevent account hijacking, most services these days require a confirmation email sent to the original address when you change the email address one file.
Kinda makes it hard when you can no longer access the original email.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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
Maybe businesses should stop sending out emails without a valid reply address.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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 is not the current messages that are an issue! So many people fail to show a basic understanding of the issues that this guy has now.
Every single company or person who he has given that email address to, over the past 20 fucking years, will need to be contacted to ensure that future mails go to the new address.
Seems like it should be simple to just tell everyone you have a new address but it is actually not that simple. Remember that website that you registered with 9 years ago? Yeah, EVERY SINGLE ONE of those needs to be REMEMBERED, contacted, and all negotiations COMPLETED (they will surely send at least one more email to the old address to verify that you are you) within the next 30 days.
Meh. I am too jaded now. Fuck him. Let him suffer. We can say it was his own stupidity and throw it all on him; after all, he should have known that "nonreply@" was going to become a standard years later.
We should just let everyone suffer instead of being hypocritical and only trying to show compassion when it is a subject seen to be as important to offer compassion for (those poor poor women who are constantly abused need their own fucking music concert without any men (except performers!) being present.)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
No, the sick part is that it is child's play on the server side to move the email folder, and 20 years of email can be a lot of email. They're just being dicks. Or maybe they can't do it because they don't have their own email server either, having farmed it out to "the cloud" through some 3rd party or something.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I suppose 20 years ago "noreply@" wasn't really standardized as an email bit bucket for domains
It's Not standardized. The Reply Address field is required by the RFC for a reason.
"Noreply@" is a convention adopted by some marketers trying to skirt the internet standards which require that all E-mail have a return path to communicate responses, error messages, and other technical issues: back to the person responsible for having sent the original e-mail. Providing this responsible sender information and the responsible party handling Notifications about technical issues with your e-mail delivery or Warnings/Abuse reports/complaints back to you is not optional.
The Romans wouldn't be able to tell the '5' from an 'S' so I'd say they would agree me thinks.
There are plenty of people who keep their old email address when a company is bought out. Remember rocketmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol? It was really handy because you know that if you received something from someone with an @aol.com email address not to expect them to be able to know much technical stuff.
My computer isn't working.
Is it turned on?
I can't tell - the power is out.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Next they'll claim that everyone should have their own area code so that nobody can take away their phone number. This is slashdot - where more and more, logic goes to die of loneliness.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Is it yet another expense to renew until you die?
Do you get to fill up your car for free? Do you get free replacement batteries for your gadgets, or free electricity to charge them?
Email, web hosting etc. are services, and services need to be paid for, one way or another. I run my own mail server and cloud storage, using my own domains, to the tune of about € 100 per year. The machines are overpowered for my modest needs, to be honest, and they still cost me less than what I spend on chocolate annually.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
And when there's a family feud? Or someone keeps trying to email ISOs? Or misuses it to spam their new get-rich-quick scheme? Or gets caught with kiddie pr0n? Or keeps forwarding infected chain emails? Or their computer gets hacked? Or the person running it dies, or is in the hospital for an extended period just as the domain comes up for renewal, and someone else grabs it after it goes back up for grabs?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Problem is that many of the people he hasn't contacted in years probably didn't notify him of their new email address ... so if he want's to look up an old co-worker or school chum, he may be out of luck.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Hell no. They should own at least two. One for personal use, one for professional use.
$50 every three years? Shit, wish I could get it that cheap. $100 for three years for one of mine, $50ish each for another two, and another $120/year for some other bugger to host them all.
Sure, some people can't afford that. Most people can, and while you may be happy with a gmail account I don't trust Google to keep providing those forever.
No, but in L4t1n it lets n00b5 know you are a 1337 h4x0r,
Was David #6 "Da6d"?
Trolling is a art,
This is what I do too, with the added bonus that I actually have a catch-all for a subdomain that goes to a single email address, thus if someone random wants my email address I give them:
their.company.name@handler.example.com
It is easy then based on the send to email address to determine who's sharing/selling email lists and blackhole them.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
And when there's a family feud?
My domain, I win this part of the feud, suspend email.
Or someone keeps trying to email ISOs?
my domain, see above
Or misuses it to spam their new get-rich-quick scheme?
my domain, see above, and add filter
Or gets caught with kiddie pr0n?
presumably I know where they live, burn their house to the ground (or turn over to FBI as if I was an ISP, which strictly I am at this point)
Or keeps forwarding infected chain emails?
help fix/suspend email
Or their computer gets hacked?
help fix/suspend email
Or the person running it dies, or is in the hospital for an extended period just as the domain comes up for renewal, and someone else grabs it after it goes back up for grabs?
There's this awesome thing called auto-renewal.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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!
Alpine is fantastic. Nothing lets me read through and deal with masses of emails as efficiently as Alpine, plus I get to see people's freaked out looks when they see me reading email via SSH.
So, your advice sucks because you can arbitrarily end service, same as any telco. They're making the same argument you do - their domain, their rules.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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!
Show your face? Courage is signing up on /.?
Fuck off, you snobbish cunt.
Yes, he just fucking said so. Reading fail.
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.
Well, If as the GP post had suggested, that I as owner of a domain make email accounts for family, and PP had posited the "what-ifs" making the case of why not create the addresses, this was my response.
If I am offering a pro-bono service (to anyone) and it becomes prohibitive to me to continue doing so (cost, legal, blacklisted domain, etc.) then I would stop service.
Generally the /. community is only pissy with telcos when they are taking money and not giving the service the money was for, or acting against the better of the community because they are monopoly providers. In this case when taking no money to provide something that is available from literally hundreds of providers for costs from $0.00 to $stupid.high it's not really the same ballpark (or even sport).
Of course the alternative would be PP point of don't provide it in the first place.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
While family feuds or problems aren't an issue for any of my direct family or extended family, you need to think about the issues of divorce, separations, family dysfunction etc otherwise you can end up in the same situation as you have with an ISP. No one in my family is so poor that $10 a year is any sort of imposition, by default I look after all my direct families domains but they could easily take them with them should something happen. I use my domains for many things apart from just my email, my brother owns a business so maybe if it grows he might want some other person to manage it etc etc. for such a tiny price I consider owning my domain names as cheap insurance (and tax deductible). back in the mid 2000's I learnt the importance of this the hard way when I changed ISP's, it took weeks to change my Address everywhere and even a year or so later I kept finding places I had the old address, The sheer number of places that have my email as a primary method of communication or authentication/userid nowadays is mind bogglingly huge, it would take months to sort it all out, I value my time far more than $10 a year.
Da6d?
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.
Show your face? Courage is signing up on /.? Fuck off, you snobbish cunt.
Snobbish? Oh, you mean, because I use polysyllabic words? That is because of something that happened to me when I was a child: education. And no, it doesn't take a lot of courage to sign up on /. - but apparently more than what some have.
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.
Your 1998 emails available on request? Yeah, that's what everyone here has just been dying to do, read all your 20 year old emails. Thank you SO much for the opportunity! I love wasting time reading emails from a random stranger on the internet, how did you know???m
I expected no takers, I always try to cite a quote or article. It reduces the "prove it" replies; an old email was my only option for a citation, no matter the apparent absurdity of the offer :)
Could we please relax? I have been placed in similar situations many times and I never abused my power. You have a point although, case resembling the scenarios you have mentioned have occurred more than once, indeed.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Tough shit. For you.
He probably has it for the same reason that I use a USERNAME@goatse.cx email for a large number of things. It's a completely valid email address which was accepted by the provider on set-up. If they didn't think through the potential problems (specifically, the email provider might want a "noreply" address of their own at some point in the future), that is their tough shit. The human reviewing the application 20 years ago should have thought a bit more. If there was a human. And if they saved themselves the cost of employing a human 20 years ago, then they're going to pay the costs of that now.
I guess that they've got a new service (or program to service an existing service) and TFM suggests using a "noreply" address. And they don't know how to work around this (e.g. "ISPnameNoReply"). Which is itself an indication that they're dangerously incompetent.
They're doing a fine demonstration of the Streisand effect.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"