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The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports:
A Halifax [Nova Scotia] 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
"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.
[...] "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 did ask the company to transfer the contents from the existing email account to a new one but they said no.
"Just flat no. No offers of help. Just the bullying that 'We're going to do it, you're going to take it. That's it.'"
Also at The Inquirer.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:56PM
I used to run a personal web and mail server at my own domain.
It was kind of a pain in the butt. Not impossible, just annoying.
You have to have at least some technical expertise around setting up your mail server of choice, and an appropriate front-end. You need to ensure you stay up to date with security patches. You need to understand things like SPF DNS records and being reverse-dns'able to ensure that major providers don't consider you spam and start dropping your outgoing e-mail in a black hole (i.e. you should do a "deliverability" test regularly). You need to have a server that's always up (the modern era of cheap cloud servers make this easier). You need recoverable backups (and need to test that they're recoverable). You need to consider having a backup MTA if your primary goes down (and the degree to which that can be abused by spammers).
None of these tasks are hard, and I learned a lot about how e-mail works over the few years I kept my personal domain. It was just the cycle of keeping up-to-date that eventually made me decide it wasn't worth the effort. As spam gets more sophisticated, the things you need to make sure you do to make sure you don't get caught in someone's spam filter get more involved. I finally decided the best way to make sure all my e-mail would be delivered to the recipients was to have it come from a major provider and not a server running in my closet.
I now run my domain on google apps, so I can still control the accounts and have my own domain, but all the annoying stuff I just don't need to deal with.