deleting an email address

Brie

My mom had an email address with sympatico.  She did use it at all the last few years so no one knows if it's still working.  She's now died so we're trying to tidy up all the loose threads and this has been mentioned.

Not sure if anyone will be able to find her password so as a stop gap I've sent an email to her address and got back a non deliverable message.  Would I be correct in assuming that means the address no longer exists?

Or should I be looking for whatever organisation this is and tell them to shut the account?  Someone had suggested that leaving it was an in for fraudsters.

HillStreetBlues

If it bounced back then no longer is use. Mostly likely if someone knew the password it could reactivate it, but can't see how any fraudsters could make use of it.

Neil_Jones

Sympatico seems to have been a Canadian company, now Bell.net, an ISP based in Canada?  from what I can gather they did do free email addresses presumably for anybody who wanted one but no longer.as of the end of 2022.  Any new ones that can be created seem to be bell.net ones which suggests if it was in the old format it's permanently defunct.

As its free it most likely one of those "sign in once every so often (90/270/365days/2 years and it remains active" type of things so if it hadn't been used since say before Covid its probably been deleted somewhere down the line.

DullGreyGuy

HillStreetBlues said:

If it bounced back then no longer is use. 

It's most likely not in use, no one can say for certain. 

At a previous clients when a member of staff left their former email account went through a 3 step shut down. Immediately the manager got access to the mail box and an autoresponder was put on saying they'd left and giving an alternative contact. After a couple of months the system was changed to send a "mailbox doesn't exist" bounce but actually the mails were still coming into the box and finally the box was archived and whilst someone sending something would get the identical bounce at this point the mail wasnt stored.