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 butthurt on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:16PM
> As someone who works for the company that makes the single most popular, and most standards compliant, mail server in the world
Congratulations!
> there's nothing about noreply that in any way violates even the spirit of 2142.
The spirit of the RFC, I'd say, is that when one has a domain name, or provides services over the Internet, one should be reachable via e-mail. A "noreply" address implies that messages will be ignored. That can obviously be used in a way that violates the RFC. I didn't say that "noreply" is always a violation. What I tried to say was that if a "noreply" address is used in place of a "list-request" address for a distribution list, that is a violation of the RFC. Are you disagreeing with that? If so, why?
Without anticipating that noreply@example.com would be something you'd want to reserve, how would you do that? The way that comes to mind is to have an invariant string in the user part of e-mail addresses, like customer_foo@example.com, customer_bar@example.com and so on. That's not a common practice.