
Customer's 20-year-old email account shut down over unusual address - rocky1138
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/eastlink-email-address-steve-morshead-halifax-1.4186249
======
pdonis
While I find Eastlink's behavior in this situation reprehensible, I have to
note that the final statement in the article is quite true:

"your email address may not be your own"

If you entrust your email to a third party, you are taking a risk. IMO that
risk is a lot bigger if the third party is your ISP, because they know they
are in a very strong negotiating position with respect to you. That's why I
have never relied on my ISP for my email service (even though they offer it, I
don't use it). It's very cheap nowadays to get ownership of your own domain
and full control of the email addresses under that domain. Yes, you still have
to depend on your hosting company for those services, but you are in a much
stronger position with them than with your ISP, because hosting is so much
more competitive.

~~~
Pharylon
This person registered their email address 20 years ago, well before gmail. At
the time, the options were

(A) Pay for an email address.

(B) Run your own email server.

(C) Use the email provided by your ISP

~~~
nine_k
Today, the options are the same.

Just running your own server got a lot easier, and you can buy stock Gmail or
Outlook Web clients under your own domain.

~~~
pdonis
_> Today, the options are the same._

No, today there is another one:

(D) Pay a hosting company to host your own domain and its email. This is kind
of like running your own server, but without having to run the machine
yourself, have an Internet connection that supports that (most ISPs forbid
hosting services on your publicly visible IP address in their terms of
service), etc.

~~~
gregmac
(E) Pay your registrar to forward your e-mail to another account.

I used to run my own server, but I got tired of constantly dealing with spam
filtering, RBLs, etc. I just forward several accounts across a handful of
domains to my gmail account, and I have gmail setup to send 'from' my own
domain (with validation).

I could switch to another service (or my own server) and other than me, no one
would notice a thing.

~~~
plasticchris
> I have gmail setup to send 'from' my own domain (with validation).

How do you set this up? I have several domains pointing to my gmail but can't
send from them...

Edit, should have just googled,
[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en)

Edit 2: this really: [https://blog.alexlenail.me/i-want-to-send-emails-from-
my-goo...](https://blog.alexlenail.me/i-want-to-send-emails-from-my-google-
domains-email-through-gmail-992bb3eae4c9)

------
Simulacra
This happened to me. I had a Knology email for twelve years (when I worked for
them and long after). I created it when I had that authority, then out of the
blue after 12 years, I got an email saying that the mailbox was being removed
due to being against TOS for being offensive. I guess someone got irritated. I
never fought it or cared because I didn't want to raise the stink, because 12
years it was fun being God@Knology.net

------
rgj
In 1998, I managed to register the root@ email address with a new Dutch ISP
that ran its email on a Windows infrastructure ( so on day 1 only
Administrator@ was taken). I even became friends with the guy who registered
info@ It took them almost a year to realize that they should have blacklisted
some accounts for registration. They took it from me in the same way: a one
month notice. The hardest part was that I couldn't convince them that I wasn't
trolling them when I registered it. But ah well.. I was :)

------
danpalmer
Can we address a different problem, aren't "noreply" addresses used by
companies just a blatant admission that they don't want to talk to you about
any issues you have? Aren't companies at least slightly ashamed of using these
sorts of methods?

If I hit reply on an automated email I would expect it to get an automated
response with clear links to helplines/addresses/etc at the very least, and
ideally to go through to the actual customer support system. Is that
unexpected? I'd imagine that less technically aware users would expect a
similar thing.

~~~
542458
> blatant admission that they don't want to talk to you about any issues you
> have

I think that's a little hyperbolic. Companies use noreply because replying to
that email is not the correct path for support. If you want support, go
through the real support system (which likely has additional features around
sorting support requests, paid support, antispam etc).

> I would expect it to get an automated response with clear links to
> helplines/addresses/etc

It would be a minor pain for me to set up and keep up-to-date email based
auto-reply systems for everything. Most users don't expect such a thing to
exist, and it's far easier just go to the website and use the FAQ/Contact us
pages there. I do occasionally check the noreply inbox for some services, and
I've never once seen anything other than spam or out-of-office notifications
in them. It's wouldn't take a ton of effort, but for nearly no reward.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> If you want support, go through the real support system (which likely has
> additional features around sorting support requests, paid support, antispam
> etc).

In other words: Make it as comfortable as possible for yourelf, fuck your
customer. I have one point where I manage my electronic communication that is
very well set up for the job, and that is my email client. If you expect me to
use your user interface in order to communicate with you, I won't be your
customer.

------
Cpoll
I think a fair alternative would have been to make his email address read-
only. It still would've been inconvenient for him, but he would have been able
to control his internet legacy on his own terms, and it would've solved their
concern about his emails appearing to be "official."

I'm not sure if the fact that they refuse to migrate his emails to a new
account is a matter of terrible customer support, technical debt, or
incompetence.

~~~
firethief
This kind of thing is why it's foolish to use an email server that doesn't
offer IMAP access. IMAP is what allows you to get your own data to do with
what you will.

~~~
cperciva
Some of us still use POP3.

~~~
vacri
What benefits do you see to using POP3 over IMAP?

~~~
Angostura
I use POP3 for some services. I have one mailbox that I share with my wife as
a joint household e-mail address (we both also have personal addresses).
Having syncing between devices would be a nightmare as things would get marked
read by the other person. Yes, I could set it up to forward to our personal
mailboxes, but it's been working fine for 20 years, so why change.

More importantly with POP - you mail gets downloaded to your device and then
that's it. It's yours, secure, for you to manage. With IMAP there's always the
possibility of the ISPs server hiccuping and deleting mail off your machine
that you _thought_ you had safely downloaded.

~~~
mirimir
Even with IMAP, you can secure messages by moving them to local folders. And
with multiple devices, you can move a different set of messages to each
device. You can also move messages _back_ to the inbox, in order to share with
another device.

I used to be a POP fanatic, mostly because I didn't like the idea of leaving
copies on the server. But then, the NSA probably logs everything, so hey.

------
placebo
I don't know, to me this sounds like a perfect scenario to let them know he's
getting a good lawyer and justifiably suing them for damages if they intend to
go through with it and delete his account. Sadly, in most cases abusers of
power only stop when there's a steep price tag on it.

~~~
SwellJoe
I'm certain the terms of service he agreed to allow the service provider to
discontinue service with some amount of notice (30 days seems likely since
that's what they gave him here). I've never signed up for any service that I
can recall that _didn 't_ explicitly allow either party to discontinue it.

While I'm pretty on board with the notion of some kind of internet access as a
modern human right, I can't really see an argument for a right to a specific
email address with a specific email provider. It's shitty that they've only
given him 30 days. And, it's shitty that they didn't do something about it
much, much sooner (noreply has been around for a _long_ time as a common
address for customer service emails, though maybe not 20 years), before his
life became so entangled in this specific email address.

But, I don't think the law is on his side. I doubt he'd find a lawyer to take
the case without paying a lot for the service. And, I really doubt he'd win
such a lawsuit.

------
Digit-Al
Best to have your own domain name. Not very expensive and you can't have it
ripped from under you for no reason at all.

~~~
borne0
I want to do this, but I don't want the hassle of running my own email server.
Can someone recommend a good email hosting service for custom domains?
Personal email, so needs to be fairly cheap.

~~~
nes350
FastMail - 5$ per month

[https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/](https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/)

~~~
smcl
I've got relatively simple requirements but I found FastMail to be really good

~~~
morganvachon
They are hands down the best email provider I've used. I moved from Gmail to
them and the speed, support, and reliability is head and shoulders above even
the paid Google service.

------
peterwwillis
Imagine there is no e-mail, no telephone, only postal mail. You've lived at
the same house for 20 years. Now you're moving out of state, and your postal
service doesn't forward mail. You have 30 days to send everyone you've ever
met or business you've done business with a letter and confirm you really are
moving to the new address.

The speed of downloading the archive is no big issue; it should take a day and
a half. And you can sort through it by importing into Gmail and using their
preconfigured filters. But the biggest problem is resetting all your old
online accounts to use a new e-mail address.

To change the address, you may have to confirm an e-mail to your old address,
so migrating all your accounts has to be done within the 30 day window.

Alternately, signing up for new accounts isn't always easy. Financial and
government services may require special codes be sent by postal mail, and a
confirmation possibly mailed back (along with waiting for it to be processed)
before you can reset or create a new account. Creating new accounts also loses
you any time or money you may have invested into an online account. And each
recipient still needs to update their address books with the new address,
probably by hand.

He certainly never owned the domain, the servers, the connection, or the name,
so the isp is legally justified. But it's a much bigger pain in the ass than
people realize, and giving him more time and assistance would be a big help,
especially since he's in the middle of a big life change already (closing on a
house).

------
rdtsc
This is like the story when Google shut off GMail for people who purchased (or
sold?) a Pixel phone through eBay.

At least criminals who encrypt your files let you pay a ransom. Wonder if
Google​ should do that too, "We shut off your account for reasons we won't
explain. But if you pay us $1200 you can get it back"

~~~
acidburnNSA
Agreed. And this further reinforces the idea that running my own personal
email server is worth it. I get that the vast majority of people aren't going
to do this and that most people on HN advise against it. I'll tell you though,
there's some satisfaction now that I have everything up and running smoothly,
with well-trained spamassassin and 10/10 server scores on mail-tester.com.

------
awinter-py
Institutional identity providers (from government passports to FB) are getting
more abusive. They want more from you in exchange for being allowed to use
their platform.

Hard to know what the causes are here: could be anything from the dominance of
free services (i.e. you can't 'take your money elsewhere') to laws that make
it harder to do business anonymously.

~~~
cylinder
Are there any decentralized identity systems? If my government refuses to give
me a passport, drivers license and copy of my birth certificate, how do I
prove I am who I claim?

~~~
pjc50
Ironically the UK identity "system" bootstraps in the other direction; you
need a photo signed by somebody suitably middle-class (
[https://www.gov.uk/countersigning-passport-
applications/acce...](https://www.gov.uk/countersigning-passport-
applications/accepted-occupations-for-countersignatories) ) to get a passport,
and lots of places use utility bills and bank statements as proof of address.

------
nikanj
"In an email to CBC News, Eastlink spokesperson Jill Laing said
"noreply@xxxxx.ca" business response email addresses have become commonplace
across businesses and industries.

The company believes that email may lead some to "believe that information
coming from this address is from Eastlink."

Sounds like this Eastlink person doesn't know most mail servers receive mail
quite happily from anything@any.domain, as anyone who's ever received spam
knows.

~~~
slantyyz
>> The company believes that email may lead some to "believe that information
coming from this address is from Eastlink."

The problem with their argument is that any email ending in @eastlink.ca will
lead some to believe that information is from Eastlink.

If you're giving customers an eastlink.ca email adddress, how can __anyone
__tell if an email from emailname@eastlink.ca is from an Eastlink employee or
not?

~~~
nickfromseattle
It's not easy for the average consumer. Comcast offers free consumer
Comcast.net email addresses, but their corporate emails are something like
@corp.comcast.com.

~~~
slantyyz
It's less about the average consumer than the individual ISP's approach to
giving out email addresses.

Given that Eastlink wanted to take back noreply@eastlink.ca (sans subdomain)
and that they're a smaller, regional Canadian ISP, I would guess their process
for handing out email addresses is less sophisticated than Comcast's.

------
jszymborski
If there is something people need to understand about online services it's
that:

(1) when you pay for an online service, a firm owes you a service.

(2) when you use an online service, a firm owes you nothing. Be OK with the
idea that the service may disappear tomorrow.

Email is an increasingly important form of communication, and you should
always have a service contract with the firm hosting your emails, with the
consumer protections that come with the exchange of money for services.

I recommend fastmail.com or mailbox.org to all my family members when the
topic comes up.

~~~
a3n
My response to this kind of problem/concern is to have your own domain. For
example, Fastmail is my provider, but I have my own domain, which email is
currently served through fastmail. But even that, unless you're Nissan or
similar, is uncertain; no one owns a domain, they only have use-rights while
they pay their registrar bills.

~~~
jbg_
Even Nissan has a registrar, although I imagine the bill would have to get
_quite_ overdue before they'd consider canceling their domain name.

~~~
MichaelGG
Nissan has its own TLD.

~~~
a3n
And before that, Nissan had the weight of Nissan, and expected that to be
enough. But it wasn't _quite_ enough:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_vs._Nissan_Compu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_vs._Nissan_Computer)

------
weinzierl
I have to admit that I have used noreply@mydomain.com for years in cases where
I have to give an E-Mail but don't really care about replies. I think I got
the idea from GitHub. Before they had the current system with @github.com
email addresses I think they recommended to just put a noreply@somedomain.tld
in your commits.

When I started I had the intention to just kill the address when I ever will
get too much SPAM, but surprisingly this never happened. I think most SPAM
bots just filter out all noreply@... addresses.

------
tempestn
Obviously not news to anyone here, but in case he's reading these comments -
there's no need to go through and manually decide which of your emails you
want to keep. Just download a copy of Thunderbird, or another free email
client, then download all your email using POP or IMAP. Once you get a new
email address set up, you can even upload all the old emails to it to make
them searchable with your new ones if you want, using IMAP.

------
userbinator
He could change his legal name to Nor Eply if he wanted to stir things up even
more...

------
jaclaz
As I see it, Eastlink has of course the right to change/close that mail
address, but - as often happens - it is the way the "closing of the account"
happens that is most inconvenient.

I doubt that technically it is in any way "difficult" or "complex" to set the
account to "receive only" for - say - three months and then set it to "read
only" (i.e. only an accessible snapshot of the e-mail account to a given date)
for another - say - three months.

I had recently something simlar happening, with another provider of free web-
mail, where I have had an account for - if maybe not 20 - at least 17-18
years, I beleive I was among one of the first users at the time. They decided
to close the service (which is as said OK to me, after all it was a free
service with just a few ads when logging in) but they did so rather abruptly
and more than that I continue getting on another account of mine notifications
about mails arrived to that address that is now inaccessible, which should
mean that the e-mail account is still "on" and that it was simply prevented
accessing it, even in read only mode.

As often happens, no way to contact (or no response from) the support.

Only as a sort of "hall of shame":

[http://www.techemail.com/](http://www.techemail.com/)

------
macspoofing
It was a reasonable decision by Eastlink. There is convention that email
addresses of the form 'noreply@xxxxx.yyy' are company notifications and there
is possibility of confusion. Bad luck for the customer.

~~~
awinter-py
there's nothing standard or reasonable about noreply.

1\. I get credit card bills from no-reply@alertsp.chase.com. Does payment
constitute a reply?

2\. Why should I want to do business with a company that doesn't want to hear
from me?

3\. Standardization re: email address is hard to find. Plenty of sites won't
accept a '+' in a gmail address, but gmail advertised that for years as a
feature.

~~~
uhhhhhhh
Well the standard and reasonable definition that has existed for longer than a
decade is that no-reply implies that there is no one actually reading the
emails you send. Its an indicator that its an automated system, and replying
or sending emails to this address will get you no where but a black hole.

The unreasonable action is giving someone 30-days to change their email,
considering how integral email's are to security these days (password resets
etc...) Eastlink made the mistake of allowing this, now they are forcing
someone else to pay.

~~~
concede_pluto
There's nothing reasonable about expecting others to read your email when you
don't read theirs. All these orgs should be blackholed as abusers of the
commons, little better than spammers.

~~~
uhhhhhhh
Invoices, shipping notifications, automated newsletters, automated
notifications, All very reasonable uses for a no-reply email addresses, and
the typical use case.

Spam is a completely different story, and rarely uses no-reply emails.

If you want to blackhole any information you request from companies than
scratch your head why you can't find your tracking information or flight
status/itinerary that's completely up to you. Ignoring the valid, reasonable
and typical use cases is just absurd

------
URSpider94
Two thoughts come to mind: first, choosing an email address is a lot like
naming your child, or getting a tattoo -- this is something that you're
potentially going to have to live with for the rest of your life. Picking a
joke address and using it for your primary online ID might be a bad choice.

Second, this is why I have been a customer of pobox.com for over a decade.
They don't host mail, they just provide forwarding and spam filtering,
directing my mail at whatever endpoint I pick (and with most clients,
including gmail, I can use them as my outgoing mail agent too). Changing mail
services is as simple as a couple of clicks in their UI. Since their overhead
is low and they get paid for their services, I expect them to be around for a
long, long time.

------
zem
i am frankly astonished that they wouldn't transfer the email to a new account
for him.

------
retrogradeorbit
"Morshead did ask the company to transfer the contents from the existing email
account to a new one but they said no."

That's just unbelievable! How bad is their customer service?

~~~
JayJee
Read like 4 more lines down. They offered to help, he's just an ass.

------
masnick
In 2012 I was able to get example@ from a major US cable company. A few months
later I tried logging in and the account no longer existed.

------
whyagaindavid
Iam wondering if some one registers, say example, mark.gatiss@gmail.com.
several years a later another real mark gatiss becomes CEO of google? What
would happen? Will they do the same?

~~~
MatekCopatek
My guess is nothing would happen because they use @google.com internally.
Besides, first.last@... format cannot be perceived as trolling, especially if
it's really your name.

------
mproud
You know… this guy _should_ have known he had it coming.

------
kazinator
Well, he's not quite a complete idiot; he didn't pick "postmaster".

Not much sympathy here; if you want your personal address to be noreply, get
your own mail domain.

Although it's not listed by RFC 2142 as a special alias, it _de facto_ is.

For instance, in my SMTP setup, I reject messages that are from noreply@<any-
domain>. (A small white-list of exceptions applies.)

A noreply address is a rude indication meaning "I want to talk to you, but I
don't want to hear from you". Yeah, well, likewise here then: while I have
your TCP connection, which _does_ accept datagrams from me, let me tell you
what I think with my RST segment.

~~~
jpitz
He's not any kind of idiot.

While it may be a de facto special alias today, that status was much less
certain when he got it. The time for his email provider to reject the address
was when he requested it.

~~~
kazinator
I'm pretty sure "noreply" was a thing in 1997.

Didn't he receive even one single e-mail from "noreply" addresses in the last
20 years to recognize that, hey, people are using this thing, which is the
same as mine!

> _The time for his email provider to reject the address was when he requested
> it._

Do any of the same people even work there any more, you know?

Maybe at that time, you could have gotten "abuse" or "postmaster" if you had
asked for those from the same provider. Sometimes such things slip through the
cracks.

~~~
jpitz
>Do any of the same people even work there any more, you know?

I do not know. What point are you making here? Regardless of the answer to
that question, the provider is still using a specious justification to cancel
an account they have provided for twenty years.

~~~
kazinator
Anyway, I don't agree with them on the grounds that there shouldn't be
"noreply" accounts.

They want to seize it from him so that they can spam people with
"noreply@theirdomain.com", which they shouldn't be doing. E-mails should be
sent with valid return addresses that someone picks up, or not sent at all.

I.e. since if this fellow contacts you by e-mail with his "noreply" account
and you write back, he then actually replies, his use of it is more legitimate
then what they are likely planning.

------
snakeanus
This a great example as to why we should start moving away from centralised
services as well as trusted 3rd parties.

~~~
dredmorbius
Or require those parties to comply with sensible and uniform user-centric
standards of behaviours.

You're relying on a directory service ... _somewhere_ , somehow. Your postal-
service address is only as solid as the property and/or tenancy registry
that's associated with _that_ address.

(There may be some way of coming up with a p2p system based on UUIDs and PKI
plus a web-of-trust reputational vouching, but that is not an alternative I
can switch to tomorrow for general use.)

------
EGreg
The only thing you can really own online is your private key. Your id should
be your public key.

------
petraeus
Company is innovating and following the evolution of the internet while also
giving the guy ample time - 20 days to retrieve his emails over imap/pop3.

Its funny given that usually hacker news users are always so progressive
demanding every company become innovate at warp speed and yet theres actually
replies defending this guy. _boggle_

------
TwoBit
What everybody should do is register their own domain and create their own
email addresses. Then an ISP is merely a forwarding service to some ISP email
address you keep private.

~~~
bjacobel
The proportion of people in the general public with the technical know-how to
do this is probably <0.1%.

~~~
balabaster
While in my mind, I think you're probably right, it shocked me to see this
written down... and upon reflection, I wonder if it isn't even lower than
that. 0.1% is 1 in every 1000...

