Hit send too soon There are (and were) several services that would serve as sort of a directory that would help you maintain your address book(s), notify your correspondents and even provide a sort of directory service to people who mail your old address as long as it remains active
"free forwarding for life" services have existed in the past and either gone titsup, or switched to charging for fwding email Many of the isps, universities etc that did offer forwarding earlier have actually stopped offering this, because even after you spamfilter email bound for your users, if you forward the email on with say half a percent of the user's inbound spam left, to somewhere like hotmail, the IP you are routing these forwards through will get treated like a huge spam source because all those half a % of spam from your fwding users tends to add up And the number of people with decades old email addresses is a vanishing minority, funnily enough -- srs (blackberry) -----Original Message----- From: "Suresh Ramasubramanian" <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2012 09:31:30 To: <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [silk] Who has your email address? Speaking from plenty of experience - a service going titsup usually means that one of two things occurs 1. A company buys up the defunct domain and provides service to its userbase (one particular set of freemail domains I know of has had eight or nine different users since the mid 90s) 2. Or the domain goes entirely defunct and its users are warned to move off their email before that happens (home.com belonging to excite's @home broadband around 2002 I think) Email has never been regulated as or offered as a public utility in the states, that I am aware of -- srs (blackberry) -----Original Message----- From: Vinit Bhansali <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2012 14:54:01 To: <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [silk] Who has your email address? On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 11:51 AM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote: > how hard it might be to switch your email address when you've had it for > decades, and who might possible have your address. Here's the list, > which I found thought-provoking: > > Who has my email address? > [...] > > Imagine the effort required to port a new email address over. Thoughts? > > Now that I think of it, I want to wonder if suddenly, a company decides to sunset their email product (Yahoo? AOL?) then would the govt. consider them a public utility and expect them to provide free forwarding for life? - Vinit
