The provider deactivates the user account after 20 years due to too unusual email address

Canadian Steve Morshead is forced to say goodbye to his email account, because the provider did not like the email address 20 years after registration

The Canadian cable company Eastlink has shown itself not to be the best, having upset its loyal customer. For twenty years, a resident of Halifax, Steve Morshead, has used the services of this provider. Back in the late 90s, he registered the mailing address noreply@eastlink.ca , with which he still lived. But suddenly the provider sent a message that the account will be deactivated after 30 days. Allegedly, the mailing address is too unusual, writes CBC News.

Steve says that he chose noreply @ back in 1998 because he wanted some unusual and well-remembered address. Eastlink registered it without any objection, and so far there have been no problems. Steve Morshead constantly used him to communicate with everyone: with friends, relatives, with banks, with lawyers. Right now he is selling the house, and the expropriation of the postal address is very inappropriate.

This story should remind all mailbox owners on third-party services that their mail accounts do not actually belong to them. This is not your server, but the property of the company, and your email account is also its property. Under the terms of use, a company can close your mailbox at any time for any of the reasons listed in the terms (read: for any reason if it wants it, as happened with Steve Morshead).
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For example, in the Terms of Use of the most popular in the world of free mail, Gmail and Google services expressly stated:

You have the right to stop using our Services at any time. In addition, Google may block your access to them at any time, limit it, or negotiate new terms related to it.

We pay great attention to user access to their data. When closing the Service, we will take all measures to warn users about it, and give them the opportunity to copy the data contained in it.

That is, no reason for closing the account or the entire service is not required at all. The provider has the right to do this arbitrarily.

Nowadays, a postal address often becomes the “center of authentication” in hundreds of web services. It is here that forgotten passwords, authorization codes and confirmation codes come. Mailing address acts as a universal login, like a passport on the Internet. If you lose your email address, you lose this universal ID.

Morshead used the address noreply@eastlink.ca to register on a huge variety of services: eBay, Kijiji, and hundreds of other places, the number of which he cannot even count.

“Now, after all these years, almost 20 years, I find it ugly that they just jumped out of the bushes and gave me 30 days to study the twenty-year archive of letters and decide what I want to keep,” says Steve Morshed (perhaps, the provider does not support IMAP and Steve cannot transfer mail to another server). The provider believes that the month is enough. A notification for the user was sent by Sheri Ansems, director of internal audit and corporate security of the company. She wrote: "We want to make sure that you have enough time to take all the necessary actions." She also explained the reason for the deactivation of the account: it allegedly does not conform to the rules and can be considered misleading: to the recipient. " Addresses like noreply @ company_name are considered to be something of a standard for many companies.

There is some sense in this, Steve himself admits that he sometimes receives strange emails that look like mail server failures. The letters were clearly not meant for him, so he always deleted them, not really delving into the content.

Frankly, the reason for blocking is rather dubious, but nothing can be done. As already mentioned, your mailing address is, in fact, not your address , and you do not have any rights to it. The provider may terminate the service at any time. Worse, the provider can be forced to close your address and all other mailboxes, as happened with the American protected mail service Lavabit, from whose owner the FBI demanded to give out keys to decrypt user correspondence ). The owner of Lavabit considered it best to destroy the keys and close the service , but did not succumb to blackmail and the threats of the special services. Although users are no better because of this: they lost their mail and paid accounts, even without a 30-day warning, like Steve Morshead. If you want your own mailbox - register your domain.

The 30-day period was set from June 7, 2017, so now the resident of Halifax has two days left until the account is closed.

For nearly 20 years, the provider has not had any complaints. Steve Morshead suspects that the problem surfaced after his wife wrote a letter to the president of Eastlink. The man is surprised that the company, whose services he used so long ago, did not show any sympathy or emotion, but simply dryly and efficiently informed him about the fact of closing the account, without even offering help or advice on what to do in such a situation.

Morshead filed a complaint with the Commissariat for Telecommunications Services Complaints , an independent non-profit organization founded in 2007 to handle disputes between users and providers of telephony, wireless communications and Internet providers.