11 ms·

Customer's 20-year-old email account shut down over unusual address

• Simulacra 9y ago
  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
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• macspoofing 9y ago
  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.
  • mercurysmessage 9y ago
    Yea, reasonable, but something that they should not have overlooked in the first place.
  • Arkanosis 9y ago
    Did that convention already exist 20 years ago?
    • politician 9y ago
      This guy deletes emails that are sent to this address that are not for him. For 20 years. For all we know he started this convention!
    • macspoofing 9y ago
      Probably not, or if it did, it was to a lesser extent. That's why I said it was bad luck for the customer that the vanity email he has chosen, happened to become associated with service notifications.
    • wiml 9y ago
      RFC 2142 gives a nice snapshot of "standard" email address conventions as of almost exactly 20 years ago. There's no real need for a "noreply" address to be standardized or conventional, though. Nobody except someone at that particular domain should be introducing noreply@ addresses into the email system (and hopefully only as reply-to addresses).
      • jwilk 9y ago
        Link for the lazy: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2142 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2142
  • awinter-py 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        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 9y ago
          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
    • macspoofing 9y ago
      >there's nothing standard or reasonable about noreply. Ok, I don't disagree but that's besides the point. For better or worse, a certain kind of convention grew around 'noreply' emails.
  • an_account 9y ago
    I think it's reasonable to take it back, but it's unreasonable how they are doing it. They should give him a year and help him transfer to a new account (copy emails over, etc). 30 days isn't much time to find every site you've signed up for in the last 20 years.
    • macspoofing 9y ago
      >I think it's reasonable to take it back, but it's unreasonable how they are doing it. I don't disagree. There should be a lot of leeway for their customer to get their accounts in order.
  • adekok 9y ago
    > There is convention that email addresses of the form 'noreply@xxxxx.yyy' are company notifications There might be such a convention now. There absolutely was not such a convention 20 years ago when he registered it. On top of that, the refusal to move the mail to a new address is abusive. It's not that difficult to do. So he's in the sad situation of having decades of mail deleted. Because "fuck you, Eastlink screwed up, and you're going to pay for it" How any can defend such actions is beyond me.
    • macspoofing 9y ago
      >There might be such a convention now. There absolutely was not such a convention 20 years ago when he registered it. That's why I said it was bad luck. >How any can defend such actions is beyond me. Just to be clear, I'm not defending the manner with which they took his account. He is (was?) their customer for 20 years and they should give him ample time to make arrangements. I'm simply stating that I understand why they would want to regain control of that email.
      • adekok 9y ago
        I appreciate the clarification, but I'm sure you understand how I understood "It was a reasonable decision by Eastlink." as supporting all of their actions.
  • valuearb 9y ago
    Why don't they just use 'donotreply@eastlink.com"? It's only their marketing emails that need a "noreply" address and there is no reason that address has to be exactly "noreply". There is no confusion with any other user or company, because their no reply addresses are noreply@theirdomain.com.
    • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      > It's only their marketing emails that need a "noreply" address Do their marketing letters need a "noreply" address? "This letter comes from nowhere, you can not reply to this letter"? Why do their marketing emails need it, then?
    • joesb 9y ago
      They can use 'donotreply@eastlink.com' but they cannot stop other customer who receive email from 'noreply@eastlink.com' to not believe that the email is official Eastlink email.
  • Mithaldu 9y ago
    You may not fully understand just how much work they're asking him to do, some of which may not even be possible, because of their own fault; and on top of this their refusal to help him fix their mistake at all. This is not "bad luck". This is "extreme cruelty". Also, since you like conventions, grandfathering in decisions made before a convention became reality is also a convention.
• Digit-Al 9y ago
  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.
  • rocky1138 9y ago
    You can, but it's much more unlikely.
  • gruez 9y ago
    Instead, you're subject to the whims of your domain registrar and your hosting provider (or email provider).
    • blfr 9y ago
      Only the registry really. The hosting provider usually doesn't control your domain, and the registrar is bound by the rules set by the registry. It's still a significant counterparty risk though.
    • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      I strongly recommend people keep their domain registrar and hosting provider as separate entities. It makes it much less likely you'll suffer a catastrophic loss.
    • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      Whether the registrar has much power depends on the registry, usually not really (you usually can just move to a different registrar and the old registrar can not legally prevent you from doing so). The hosting/email provider is obviously not a problem at all, as you can switch to a different provider at any time (just make sure to keep the domain registration and the service provider separate) if your current provider is an asshole--or you can just host your own server if you want to avoid any providers messing with your emails.
    • jeltz 9y ago
      I run a registrar, and while we can mess with people's domains we would get in serious trouble with the registry and you would get the domain back if we did so. Many registries have rules which protect the domain owners from the whims of registrars, but if you are worried you can look it upf or your specific registry.
• awinter-py 9y ago
  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.
  • _jal 9y ago
    > Hard to know what the causes are here Institutional collusion. I don't mean explicit, agreed-upon conspiring; I mean the sort of industry signaling you see everywhere, like cellphone provider and airline pricing. FB, say, ups the intrusiveness in one way, and the other surveillance firms watch carefully. If the blowback is manageable, yay, new normal has been achieved.
  • _jal 9y ago
    > Hard to know what the causes are here Institutional collusion. I don't mean explicit, agreed-upon conspiring; I mean the sort of industry signaling you see everywhere, like cellphone provider and airline pricing. FB, say, ups the intrusiveness in one way, and the other surveillance firms watch carefully. If the blowback is manageable, yay, new normal has been achieved.
  • cylinder 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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/accepted-occupations-for-countersignatories https://www.gov.uk/countersigning-passport-applications/acce... ) to get a passport, and lots of places use utility bills and bank statements as proof of address.
    • 9y ago
• danpalmer 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    > 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 9y ago
      > 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.
    • danpalmer 9y ago
      If it’s not the right place for support then I think an autoresponder with helpful directions is far more respectful of the customer. However I still think most companies should be able to link it directly to their public customer support address.
• peterwwillis 9y ago
  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).
• weinzierl 9y ago
  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.
• jszymborski 9y ago
  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.
  • brianberns 9y ago
    Purchasing a service is no guarantee that it will still exist in the future. It seems to me that a brand-name free provider like, say, gmail.com will probably far outlast the for-pay services that you mentioned.
    • jszymborski 9y ago
      mailbox.org has been around since 1992 and fastmail since 2001. Both of those companies are profitable. Compare that with gmail that came out of beta in 2009, belongs to a company that is known for serially shutting down much-used and much-loved services, and whose profitability (that of gmail not google) is not entirely clear.
      • brianberns 9y ago
        Sorry, but that does nothing to persuade me. Gmail has over a billion active users. Any disruption in service would be felt worldwide. Fastmail and mailbox.org could disappear without even making the news.
        • jbg_ 9y ago
          History is full of wildly popular things that became irrelevant. Gmail will certainly join that list one day.
• nikanj 9y ago
  "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.
  • firethief 9y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean, but the problem would be that noreply@ZZZ is often used by the company that runs ZZZ; using "noreply" for a personal address presents the same problems as registering other commonly-reserved addresses like postmaster@ZZZ or admin@ZZZ. It doesn't have anything to do with the ability to actually receive mail on an account named "noreply".
    • NathanOsullivan 9y ago
      The parent is quoting EastLink's justification from the article
  • sheepdestroyer 9y ago
    I think that at least gmail usually flags these kind of spoofed addresses. But in this case, being sent by valid servers, gmail or others would just acknowledge it as the valid email address that it is. Thus leading to a possible misunderstanding for the receiver.
  • slantyyz 9y ago
    >> 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?
    • 9y ago
• Cpoll 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Some of us still use POP3.
      • ddalex 9y ago
        And they guy doing the Primitive Technology videos is building a civilization with his bare hands, but the rest of us prefer some decent tools.
      • jbg_ 9y ago
        Yes, I believe that is what parent was calling foolish.
        • richardwhiuk 9y ago
          No, I believe the parent was calling web access foolish. POP3 forces you to have your own data.
      • vacri 9y ago
        What benefits do you see to using POP3 over IMAP?
• placebo 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
  • gcb0 9y ago
    he should also sue then for impersonating and harassing. he trusted then to handle his private personal email. instead they sent out millions of messages faking that it was from his account, when they could have used, literally, any other combination of words to tell the recipients that they should not reply to the message. change no to dont, and it is even more functional to the intended purpose. it's so trivial to use another bogus email on the from field that his lawyer should have no problem claiming it might have been a malicious employer harassing him. because, really, that's the only explanation that is actually plausible.
• TwoBit 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    The proportion of people in the general public with the technical know-how to do this is probably <0.1%.
    • balabaster 9y ago
      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...
• pdonis 9y ago
  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.
  • Laforet 9y ago
    Do you really own a domain name or just a fixed term lease that may be revoked by multiple parties and by multiple means?
    • kpil 9y ago
      Found a company, register a trademark in the same name in all relevant jurisdictions, hire a legal team that are trawling the internet and the world in general for trademark abuse so the trademark is defended. Hope that some registrar or internet body do not change a policy of some sort or another. Did I miss something?
      • Laforet 9y ago
        There is no guarantee you'd win in court, especially if your domain is seized by a state level actor. This is why I think private keys combined with some kind of immutable log (cough...blockchain...cough) are far better as identity tokens than anything based on DNS.
        • subway 9y ago
          Identity tokens only implement the underlying address space. Friendly identifiers either have to be immutable (read:nearly worthless), or handled by some form of registry. First come, first served registey with some form of expiry implemented via smart contracts might be possible, but it seems unlikely any one registry would ever become 'the canonical registry', as that just puts is back in the same situation as DNS. This is a hard problem to solve without asking folks with big sticks/guns to enforce policy decisions.
• rgj 9y ago
  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 :)
• EGreg 9y ago
  The only thing you can really own online is your private key. Your id should be your public key.
• masnick 9y ago
  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.
• URSpider94 9y ago
  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.
• kazinator 9y ago
  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.
  • quickthrower 9y ago
    Was it a defacto special alias in 1997 though? Noreply is more of a mass mailing business thing to force customers through another channel to get help.
  • jpitz 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        >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.
• zem 9y ago
  i am frankly astonished that they wouldn't transfer the email to a new account for him.
• tempestn 9y ago
  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.
• snakeanus 9y ago
  This a great example as to why we should start moving away from centralised services as well as trusted 3rd parties.
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    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.)
• rdtsc 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
  • pdonis 9y ago
    Google isn't an ISP, and you don't pay them for access to GMail. So I would say you're in an even worse position with regard to Google than you are with respect to your ISP, as far as expectation of support is concerned.
• userbinator 9y ago
  He could change his legal name to Nor Eply if he wanted to stir things up even more...
• retrogradeorbit 9y ago
  "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 9y ago
    Read like 4 more lines down. They offered to help, he's just an ass.
• whyagaindavid 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
• jaclaz 9y ago
  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/
• mproud 9y ago
  You know… this guy should have known he had it coming.
• petraeus 9y ago
  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