It was a reasonable decision by Eastlink. There is convention that email addresses of the form 'noreply@xxxxx.yyy' are company notifications and there is possibility of confusion. Bad luck for the customer.
They should give him a year and help him transfer to a new account (copy emails over, etc). 30 days isn't much time to find every site you've signed up for in the last 20 years.
I don't disagree. There should be a lot of leeway for their customer to get their accounts in order.
There might be such a convention now. There absolutely was not such a convention 20 years ago when he registered it.
On top of that, the refusal to move the mail to a new address is abusive. It's not that difficult to do. So he's in the sad situation of having decades of mail deleted. Because "fuck you, Eastlink screwed up, and you're going to pay for it"
How any can defend such actions is beyond me.
That's why I said it was bad luck.
>How any can defend such actions is beyond me.
Just to be clear, I'm not defending the manner with which they took his account. He is (was?) their customer for 20 years and they should give him ample time to make arrangements. I'm simply stating that I understand why they would want to regain control of that email.
1. I get credit card bills from no-reply@alertsp.chase.com. Does payment constitute a reply?
2. Why should I want to do business with a company that doesn't want to hear from me?
3. Standardization re: email address is hard to find. Plenty of sites won't accept a '+' in a gmail address, but gmail advertised that for years as a feature.
The unreasonable action is giving someone 30-days to change their email, considering how integral email's are to security these days (password resets etc...) Eastlink made the mistake of allowing this, now they are forcing someone else to pay.
Spam is a completely different story, and rarely uses no-reply emails.
If you want to blackhole any information you request from companies than scratch your head why you can't find your tracking information or flight status/itinerary that's completely up to you. Ignoring the valid, reasonable and typical use cases is just absurd
Ok, I don't disagree but that's besides the point. For better or worse, a certain kind of convention grew around 'noreply' emails.
but its like he said: he doesn't own that email address though he thought he did. I went through this a few years ago, and I got a domain instead, which I do own.
It's only their marketing emails that need a "noreply" address and there is no reason that address has to be exactly "noreply". There is no confusion with any other user or company, because their no reply addresses are noreply@theirdomain.com.
Do their marketing letters need a "noreply" address? "This letter comes from nowhere, you can not reply to this letter"?
Why do their marketing emails need it, then?
This is not "bad luck".
This is "extreme cruelty".
Also, since you like conventions, grandfathering in decisions made before a convention became reality is also a convention.
There's no real need for a "noreply" address to be standardized or conventional, though. Nobody except someone at that particular domain should be introducing noreply@ addresses into the email system (and hopefully only as reply-to addresses).