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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 tangomargarine on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:05PM (1 child)
Geez, after reading that link...I have a hard time believing anybody could be this incompetent. It must be malicious.
"If you're not satisfied with our service, use one of the following contact methods: {lists 4 different things that are all either broken or actively ignored}."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:19PM
A few IP/domain blacklists are actually malicious. Most are not. The problem is usually the operators of the systems using the lists; they don't really differentiate between them and haven't updated theirs since the 2010. They just throw 50 lists on their system so they can advertise "checked against 50 blacklists!" to clients. They don't really take into account that 20 of them are dead, 20 of them are scams, and 9 are just okay.
Your system can use blacklists but it can't use just one. About the only one I really have the highest confidence in is Spamhaus, but even that one, if there are enough traits the mail is probably okay I let it through. Anyway the goal of these lists is to identify the sending systems, because the actual email addresses and even domains that are on the mail are borderline meaningless (trivial to send each spam mail with its own address).
The blacklists focused on sending systems are okay-ish, but really need to be fast to matter, because most spam are sent out in very tight bursts infrequently rather than a continuous stream. Sending out bursts like that makes them a lot harder to block. After 15 minutes the listing is too old to matter much for better than 50% of spam.
Google doesn't really use IP/domain blacklists. They rely almost entirely on content scanning. This is a riskier proposition for those of us with some dislike to continuously scan the contents of users' mailboxes. Google doesn't care. They'll scan everything in your mailbox constantly and even pop things out to put into the spam folder after delivery.