E mail after death
by Charles Miller, May 25, 2007

Not too long ago I read an article, via the internet of course, in the Sydney Morning Herald. The subject of the article made me pause and think, and I suppose this is something we all ought to consider.

The question for anyone who has prepared a Last Will and Testament is, what provision did you make for your email after you are gone?

This question is probably even more relevant for a lot of Atención readers here in San Miguel de Allende than for others. The reason for this is that more people here rely on the internet for their communications.

Banks, investment houses and credit card companies have been encouraging people to sign up to receive their statements via email or a web site. If you are one who has done this, then your lawyer needs to be aware of this because there might not be any paper trail left behind to help manage your estate.

Time is of the essence because there could be some important deadlines you do not even know about. You need to be aware that web-based email accounts such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and others have a policy of deleting all the mail in inactive accounts. This means that at some point, say 30 or 60 days after the last time the account was accessed, the account and all its email will be permanently deleted.

Depending on whether or not you made hard copies of important account statements, your executor might need to get copies of these before the email account is purged.

You had better also take this into account if you or anyone you know is hospitalized for an extended period of time. If the web-based email account is not accessed before the deadline, it is likely to disappear.

This problem is not restricted to only web-based email. An email account provided by your Internet Service Provider (the cable company or phone company) is good only for so long as the account is active. Most likely the email account will be deleted if the internet connection account is closed.

The legal and financial world has rules laid down for how to deal with deceased account holders. For example, when a bank is notified the account is “frozen” until the legal requirements are met. Unfortunately, there are no such policies for email; at least no consistent policies.

The important message here is that the executor of your estate might need to make sure that important emails are preserved before they are automatically deleted.

The individual companies such as Yahoo, Hotmail and Google each have their own policies concerning email after death. Many will require a death certificate but some might make things difficult. Apparently Google requires a Power of Attorney signed by the diseased. That might be hard to obtain if the accountholder no longer has a pulse.

Of course all of this assumes that those left behind even know what your email address is. And just to make things more difficult, most people now have more than one email address.

So what should you do about this? The answer to this question is very important, so pay close attention: Do not take legal advice from some know-it-all who writes a newspaper column!

After reading this article, if you believe you have cause for concern, then you should discuss this with your lawyer. He or she ought to be able to tell you what will be needed by your executor after your passing, and you should make the appropriate provisions.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ@SMAguru.com.