I'm leaning toward incompetence on this one. Certainly if they were deliberately keeping his data against his will, it would be stupid to email him about it. Th

I'm leaning toward incompetence on this one. Certainly if they were deliberately keeping his data against his will, it would be stupid to email him about it. The people responsible for deleting the account info probably deleted everything they knew about or had access to, but his email was also in some other database run by marketing or something. Or their databases are just overall horrifically denormalized and inconsistent. (Of course, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishably from malice. Hard to say if that's applicable here.)