Renewable Email

Email addresses have become part of our identity.  Much like a long-possessed phone number, we identify them with our friends, families and ourselves.  But unlike phone numbers, our email addresses are repositories for highly personal information.  We think little about relinquishing a phone number, assuming without great concern that someone will have that phone number again at some point in the future, but what about relinquishing an email address…or not relinquishing it, but having it repossessed by a service provider.  While one's personal emails and profile information may be erased, it is possible that email sent to the email address might contain personal information for the previous user.

That concern was raised in a mashable article detailing how Microsoft and other service providers recycle email addresses.  The article explains that Microsoft requires users to log into their email accounts at least once every 270 days.  If not, they risk having their account deleted.  Following the deletion, the account will be made available again after 360 days.

It may seem that 270 days of inactivity is a reasonable amount of time to give someone to keep their account active.  However, it is not uncommon to have to create multiple email accounts for different purposes, and it becomes difficult sometimes to track these or remember all of them.  For individuals, this may just be a case of personal accountability.  But for organizations, there might be greater privacy concerns.

 I’ve had to create different google accounts for emergency communication, for wiki access and for file sharing.  Not all of these are needed continually and some I’ve forgotten.  Large organizations could have countless inactive Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft accounts with private or sensitive information of which they are unaware.  It may be that it is highly unlikely that such a breach of privacy could occur, but the implications of such a breach should be enough for organizations to think more about setting guidelines for creating email and web accounts for business purposes.