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

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).