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Canada IT Technology

Customer's 20-Year-Old Email Account Shut Down Over Unusual Address (www.cbc.ca) 365

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.
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Customer's 20-Year-Old Email Account Shut Down Over Unusual Address

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  • by Fear the Clam ( 230933 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @07:50PM (#54744297)

    trade it for abuse@eastlink.ca

    • I wonder how many people today would get:

      selfabuse@eastlink.ca

      This would be a case where 20 years ago, it probably won't pass the censors, but today?

  • Lavabit (Score:2, Informative)

    by iYk6 ( 1425255 )

    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.

  • Pop (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Master Moose ( 1243274 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @07:57PM (#54744315) Homepage

    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?

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @08:00PM (#54744331)

    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?

    • by dbIII ( 701233 )
      The not immediately obvious thing is usernames tied to an email address. When you no longer have access to the address any confirmation hoops you have to jump through get sent to somewhere you can no longer find. That's how I lost my first slashdot username (annoying but no loss - only a couple of years older than this one) and I can appreciate that losing multiple logins would be extremely annoying.
      The other is informing a lot of people that they can no longer contact you on the same address that's been
    • Although from TFA it appears he would lose access to his actual emails - I assume they're stored online - from the summary I'd say his bigger concern is that he has used this email address to communicate with just about everyone for 20 years. It's like being told you're being evicted and you have 30 days to find a new home and tell everyone you know and every company you deal with where you'll be living from now on.

      It would take days for me to change the registered email address for every site and service I

  • Yahoo (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @08:01PM (#54744333) Homepage Journal
    Wait until Yahoo! mail shuts down. So many website accounts will be toast
    • After paying that amount for a company and then dropping the brand (intellectual property) do you think Verizon will proceed to delete the only remaining part of their purchase?

      Wait don't answer that.

  • From TFA (Score:5, Informative)

    by viperidaenz ( 2515578 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @08:01PM (#54744335)

    "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...)

    • by xlsior ( 524145 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @08:35PM (#54744439) Homepage

      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.

  • by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @08:04PM (#54744347) Homepage

    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

    • by evanh ( 627108 )

      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.

    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @12:41AM (#54745081)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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.

  • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @08:04PM (#54744349) Journal
    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.
    • There's no challenge to it. I have my own domain up at Zoho.com for free to accept and send messages but at home I have a Synology NAS which has a mail server as a package. Turn it on, answer a few easy questions, and you are running. I use that one to store all of my messages that I want to keep.

      I have my email client configured with the public (currently Zoho.com but it can change easily) and my private. If there's a message I want to keep I just drag it over to a folder that's on my private server or for

      • Domain... NAS... let me stop you right there. Because you've just lost 99% of the internet population with your fancy and super complicated IT talk.

        If I can't setup the account complete with email address when I'm first prompted to turn on my new smartphone, or I'm not just magically told I have this thing called email when I join a company or an ISP then it's too complicated for nearly everyone.

    • 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.

      So nothing new then? I mean this has been the status quo with how we used the internet for 20 years. People in general haven't suffered. Even as the hordes of Geocities sites disappeared into the Ether the internet and associated online services have only become more popular.

  • Auto-delete (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @08:06PM (#54744359)

    He is in the process of moving all of his email to Yahoo's servers. Should be good for another 20, right???

  • 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.

    • but securing things properly is a pain.

      If you want, you can have your DNS set up to forward your email to a gmail account. Then in gmail, you can set the "reply-to" email to be your desired email address.

      That is the lazy way to get your own email address, without running your own qmail server (I assume you'd run qmail if you want security).

      • Yes, but then you are paying Google for another domain to be hosted; my preference would be to have email forwarded to my account-du jour, ideally with basic spam and content filtering before the forward.

        It isn't that big of a deal, but it is a little barrier compared to zero public facing services today.

        • my preference would be to have email forwarded to my account-du jour,

          Gmail can do that too, lol.

          • by KGIII ( 973947 )

            If you don't mind Putin reading your email, you can host a domain's email for free (with up to 1000 addresses) via Yandex. You just change your records at your registrar and the propagate almost immediately, and you can configure quite a few things from there - including a fairly robust web interface, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, etc...

            They had excellent uptime, when I played with them. They weren't in blacklists or anything. I seem to recall you can do SPF and all that jazz. If you're paranoid, you can encrypt messag

    • If you only want to have a couple of users at most there are a few places that offer free email hosting and let you use your domain. I'm currently with Zoho.com and use my domain for mail. Only had one problem with them in a few years. They have a feature that you can assign one user to act as a catch all for any email addresses in the domain that aren't set up instead of having them being returned as no such user. I use it because I sign up to every site with a different email address in order to tell whic

  • 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.

  • 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.
  • 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.

  • by at10u8 ( 179705 ) on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @01:36AM (#54745249)
    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

The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of space and time. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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