EBAY fraud alert

From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch_at_30below.com>
Date: Mon Sep 1 18:50:00 2003

At 09:51 09/01/2003 -0400, you wrote:
[snip]
>Jerome Fine replies:
>
>I have a comment and a question!

[snip]

>Question: As far as the OLD ISP is concerned, is there any way that
>a user can at least pick up e-mails that are still sent to that old address
>as long as the ISP is still accepting them?

Short Answer: Maybe.

Long Answer: Depends on a *lot* of stuff, like: what MTA (Mail Transport
Agent - a.k.a. mail server software) they're using, if they're actually
queueing the incoming mail, etc...

Many mail server programs can be instructed to accept mail, then silently
drop it into the bit-bucket - if that's the case, then if you were to
contact your old ISP, it may be able to have it forwarded to your new
account instead of just dropping it - it's trivial in qmail (what I've used
for almost a decade). Other MTAs can [probably] do it as well, but I'm only
versed in qmail...

If you do contact your ISP, you may have to pay a monthly charge to keep
the email address functional - at Iceberg Computers, it's $5USD/month to
keep an email address w/storage. Each ISP will have their own rules &
rates, tho.

>Question: Is there anything as far as practice goes on the internet that
>requires an ISP who accepts an e-mail (i.e. without rejecting it) to at
>least forward that e-mail to the old original person even if that person
>no longer has a paid for account?

IANAL, but in my experience, no. As email is not considered a "private"
form of communication [which is 1 reason of many why all those damnable
legal disclaimers are 1) useless, and 2) stupid] so if you abandon your
account, AFAIK the data therein is now the property of the ISP. And -- the
ISP *may* have good reason to keep the account open - many, many people
abandon email accounts due to spam, and many ISPs will route the incoming
mail from that abandoned account directly into their spamfilters -- I was
looking at doing this myself, but there were too many false positives. Some
ISPs don't care about false positives to the same level as me, however. :-(

To know for sure, you will want to contact your old ISP, and ask them --
make sure you get past the countermonkeys, tho, and talk right with the
sysadmin who [hopefully] should have a clue...

HTH,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
Received on Mon Sep 01 2003 - 18:50:00 BST