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 tha

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/