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

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday July 06 2017, @06:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the retroactive-decisions dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 07 2017, @02:03PM (2 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Friday July 07 2017, @02:03PM (#536114) Journal

    With your own domain and your own server. Seizing of the domain won't zap your already received emails. And PGP signed emails make sure that impersonation becomes hard.

    Otoh, maybe .onion is the domain one should have. No authority there nor kangaroo courts.

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  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:37PM (1 child)

    by butthurt (6141) on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:37PM (#536633) Journal

    > Otoh, maybe .onion is the domain one should have.

    That TLD only works on the Tor network. Your correspondents will have difficulty sending e-mail to you:

    [...] the default Tor exit policy rejects all outgoing port 25 (SMTP) traffic. So sending spam mail through Tor isn't going to work by default. It's possible that some relay operators will enable port 25 on their particular exit node, in which case that computer will allow outgoing mails; but that individual could just set up an open mail relay too, independent of Tor. In short, Tor isn't useful for spamming, because nearly all Tor relays refuse to deliver the mail.

    -- https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq-abuse.html.en [torproject.org]

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday July 08 2017, @11:09PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Saturday July 08 2017, @11:09PM (#536681) Journal

      Sure. But there's possibilities to build another email protocol that is built using other ports, other connection setup and infrastructure. SMTP badly needs an upgrade and social media is surely NOT the answer.