What happens to your email account after you die?
We log into our email, social media and bank accounts, perhaps dozens of times a day, without thinking about how effortlessly we manage our lives online. But have you ever thought about what happens to these accounts when you die?
Donna Johnson, 43, and her family found out how frustrating it can be to gain access to a loved one’s digital accounts when her father, Ray Johnson, passed away unexpectedly in January 2010. Not having the password to her father’s email account turned an already difficult time into a financial nightmare. Her mother, Claudia Johnson, 67, tried to guess the password to her husband’s email, without any luck, and the company wouldn’t reset the password or grant her access, saying their user agreement terminated upon the account holder’s death....
Johnson didn’t want anyone to have to go through for her what her mother did when her father died.
“In my will, I put down all of my main accounts, my email account, my photo accounts, my Facebook account, anything like that,” she says. “I listed what my login and what my password were and that those would be provided to the executor of my estate just so in case anything happened to me, they could go in, they could get anything they needed before anything was shut down.”
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/what-happens-to-your-email-account-after-you-die-160820508.html
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Anyone who has been a power of attorney or trustee will tell you what a nightmare this job is. E-mail and all the rest just adds an additional layer of red tape to deal with.
Cher
When the junk mail can no longer be received, it will stop. That will teach those SOB's sending me all that trash.
