After a chat with my father tonight, in which we discussed my grandparents, I was reminded of dad’s correspondences with them while he was in Vietnam. As an ancillary thought, I began thinking that I should write them since I live a significant distance away and only see/speak with them when I’m up to the home town for a visit. Becuase my handwriting is awful and they have that dreaded “old people eyes” disease, I figure it’s best to send them typewritten missives. Which leads to my question:
If I were to email them, would it be possible to retrieve our email correspondence legally ? I’m a SysAdmin for an investigative entity, so I’ve got some knowledge as to how that might be done surreptitiously, but I wonder if a service provider would supply a next of kin or other relative with access to that correspondence for posterity. After all, if they were paper correspondence, they’d surely be saved with a lovely ribbon in a beautiful mahogany box.
You MIGHT be able to get at email in a dead person’s account but it’ll depend on the service provider and terms that the deceased agreed to when they signed up.
This has been an issue recently, with Yahoo refusing to allow the parents of a dead soldier to read his mail:
I agree with both sides. That’s what triggered the OP. I wonder what the folks at Yahoo! and others think about limited access (i.e. if I were to request transcripts of only those emails between the deceased and the requestor). Naturally, one can preserve through their client or web-based provider their sent and received messages, but in many (if not most) US locales, individuals can record by whatever means available conversations (written, verbal, etc) with the consent of only one party.
From my side, I simply want to make sure that my missives to my elderly relatives don’t disappear.
Yahoo is certainly not going to store all its clients emails in perpetuity. I don’t know for how long, but sooner or later they will be considered “dead records” and be disposed of. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the time period is as short as 30 days, though perhaps they have some legal obligations to preserve things for a longer period. I would be surprised to find that it’s longer than a year or two.
Frankly, if you want to keep copies, save them to disk and don’t rely on your ISP.
And whassamtta, you too lazy to go to the mailbox? Your arm is broken, maybe?
Kids today…
Why not save a copy of the letters you send them to a disk, and save the letters they send you the same way? That’s what I do with my letters to/from my parents. Or, you could print them too I suppose. There are easier ways to save e-mail correspondence for posterity.
Google specifies 9 months of inactivity. Hotmail specifies 30 days which to my mind makes it useless for people in the military or in fact to me. Yahoo specifies “extended periods of inactivity”.
Si if you know this, why the question? The emails aren’t going to be around for long. Am I misunderstanding your OP?
The deceased’s emails should go to whomever he/she has bequeathed his/her personal effects.
If there has been an order made for laywers/executors to destroy all personal documents and correspondence, then that should be carried out, electronic data included.
But in any other circumstance, emails SHOULD be accessed. Given how many financial activities are carried out online, I can’t see how lawyers and executors can properly wrap up someone’s estate if they don’t have access to these details.
No you are misinterperting me as the orginal poster who is in fact cheezmonger not gazpacho. I was adding commentary to the discussion.
Maybe I’m missing something here (or looking too hard at the specific wording vs. the more general question), but why would you need to retrieve such correspondence? If you sent the email to them yourself, you should already have a copy.
That said, most email clients are configured to delete email off of the server as soon as it’s retrieved, so there wouldn’t be much the ISP could do.
Pardon me, my bad.
Are you suggesting that free service providers have some duty to maintain an archive for their customers?