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.
trade it for abuse@eastlink.ca
Pray you never get divorced, sued, have a need to sue someone else, audited, or are suspected of a crime.
"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
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.
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.
Because a 5 is not a v.
The Romans would disagree.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
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.