SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 RedBear on Friday July 07 2017, @12:45AM (2 children)
Gosh, that's awf--wait, what? "Decide what I want to keep"?
He has 20 years of email sitting on the email SERVER of his ISP? How?
Besides those who use a service like GMail, it's been my understanding that most people even today with ISP-based email accounts are still largely using the older POP3 protocol and downloading their mail daily from servers with ridiculously archaic mailbox size limitations, like a maximum of 100MB. Even the commercial IMAP and Exchange email services from Rackspace (previously MailTrust) had a size limitation of 10GB per account until just a few years ago when they finally upgraded it to 25GB, and even 25GB hasn't been big enough for the more prolific users in my previous company to hold less than 10 years worth of email without backing up older mail offline. And those were the highest account sizes I could find at any online business email provider at the time. Was this Canadian ISP really handing out web-based email accounts with infinite storage limits in 1998? That's kind of amazing if true. GMail didn't exist until 2004 and it's main claim to fame (besides being free) was that you would never again have to delete email due to hitting a maximum storage limit, and even today it seems to have a limit of 15GB for individual accounts. Even Hotmail always had a relatively small account storage limit.
And then to go beyond all that and have no clue that you can just jump on any fast connection with a local email client like Thunderbird and download that 20 years worth of email to your local computer in a matter of hours... To have no local backups of 20 years worth of correspondence... That's just incredibly sad. Somebody needs to help this guy download his email and dispel his illusion that he needs to somehow manually sort through 20 years of emails in less than 30 days to decide what to keep. It sucks that they're not giving him more time to work on switching all of his related online accounts to a new email address, but he seems to think he's in a terrible quandary that doesn't actually exist.
Best thing he can do for himself is get the hell away from being dependent on that ISP in any way, as fast as he can.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @05:11AM (1 child)
Gmail beats local storage due to hard drive crashes, OS install corruption, floods, theft, and fires.
No, I'm not going to make daily tape backups and FedEx them to geographically separated underground bunkers. No, I'm not going to pay for a service that will delete my backups if one day I'm unable to pay the bill.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 07 2017, @02:11PM
Newer malware may actually connect to your Gmail and wipe it or encrypt it. If you can access it. So can malware.
For offisite backup there's no need to bother with FedEx, bunkers or bills. Just encrypt it and save it on tape or disc. Seal it into a airtight box stuffed with some de-humidification capsules. Then just dig it down somewhere where people will not wander nor build stuff.