Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cpoll | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Eastlink is a popular ISP, not just a webmail provider. They almost certainly do offer IMAP access to their email accounts. and this help page[1] seems to support that.

[1]http://my.eastlink.ca/customersupport/internet/faqs/email.as...

Hm, I think the article also alludes to that near the end. So it's not clear why Morshead "is facing the daunting task of going through almost two decades of email messages" to decide what to keep. It sounds like he doesn't understand (nor the journalist) that he can retrieve his emails en masse.

Some of us still use POP3.

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.

What benefits do you see to using POP3 over IMAP?

I use POP3 for some services. I have one mailbox that I share with my wife as a joint household e-mail address (we both also have personal addresses). Having syncing between devices would be a nightmare as things would get marked read by the other person. Yes, I could set it up to forward to our personal mailboxes, but it's been working fine for 20 years, so why change.

More importantly with POP - you mail gets downloaded to your device and then that's it. It's yours, secure, for you to manage. With IMAP there's always the possibility of the ISPs server hiccuping and deleting mail off your machine that you thought you had safely downloaded.

Even with IMAP, you can secure messages by moving them to local folders. And with multiple devices, you can move a different set of messages to each device. You can also move messages back to the inbox, in order to share with another device.

I used to be a POP fanatic, mostly because I didn't like the idea of leaving copies on the server. But then, the NSA probably logs everything, so hey.

It's not that I see a benefit to POP3; it's just that I've never seen a reason to switch. I download my email to a desktop client.

IMAP does that as well, you just don't have to delete it from the server to do so.

You can run POP3 without deleting mail from the server. The POP3 commands for "download message" and "delete message" are completely independent; I typically have my mail client set to delete messages from the server 14 days after downloading them, so that I'll always have recent email in two places.

I know people that use it because they think it is better from a privacy standpoint.

It might not be correct now but at one point the Electronic Communications Privacy Act stipulated that data left on a server for more than 180 days is considered to be abandoned and the government can easily and legally access it.

Yes, there is that. But in reality, the NSA arguably has copies of everything. Or at least, metadata. And it almost certainly retains copies of all encrypted messages.

I'm more worried about the situation where somebody reveals some corruption in a small town police department and the police decide to investigate that individual by looking at that person's "abandoned" data.

I use Maildir over ssh/sftp.

Yes, I believe that is what parent was calling foolish.

No, I believe the parent was calling web access foolish. POP3 forces you to have your own data.

You know those isolated tribes throwing spears at helicopters? You're them.

> 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.

Likely explanation: bounced emails landed in his mailbox, and his access to them is problematic. Migration would mean they have to "clean the data", which as we know can never be done to 100%, plus it is time consuming / expensive.

I'm not protecting the company, just pointing out the forces.

They gave him a month, he already has access to any of those emails, and will continue to - nothing to clean, in that sense.

In any case, it's not their stated reason. If they're sending emails using noreply already (which are bouncing), that's a completely different issue, and I wonder if he wouldn't have a case for them impersonating him :)

I find it unlikely that anyone cold emails "noreply".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com