I was made aware of this point when my FIL passed away leaving a password for his online account but no instruction regarding what to do with it. His wife didn’t want to make any decisions either. So his account has been floating ever since and will be filled with more and more spam and messages from companies which will occupy storage place that has to be cooled which is bad for the environment. He was old school so that there’ll be limits to his online activities but if you extrapolate that to billions of people and think of the resulting waste of energy, it may make you uncomfortable. Some, if not all, email providers now make it possible to delete a complete account with one click. That’s the way to go. I feel tempted to do that sometime with his account but the later that is done, the more suspicious providers might become?
As for my own accounts, I’ve made arrangements for my heirs as to how to access them and what to do with them. In contrast to earlier generations, our online accounts may include contracts requiring online communication exclusively which can only be terminated at a loss if it’s not done within the cancellation period. I feel I owe it to my heirs to make it as easy as possible for them to manage my posthumous affairs. I have a hunch, though, that I need to do more than that (digital will? Sharing multi-factor authentication methods, etc.?)
I hope that when my time comes, all my important stuff will have been printed off and stored in labelled folders (cos I’m organised like that) and the rest of it, like emails etc isn’t of interest to anyone but me - although I see that big G has implemented some sort of thing whereby if your G account hasn’t been active for a year, it gets cancelled automatically. So I wonder if any accounts linked to that, will also go away? Presumably won’t be able to be accessed anyway without verification.
Gosh, who would have thought we would ever have to think about this stuff?
Why do anything? As Pixie mentioned google and many other email providers will close an account after a period of inactivity and it’s probably more to do with they’re not making money from you than them considering the environment
You can “memorialise” a deceased person’s Facebook account. Have no idea what that means but it was pointed out to me years ago.
I have a USB drive set up that resets the password on all my computers so my kids have easy access and I have left the password to my password manager which contains all the passwords for my account with my will.
In the Control Panel search box, type create password reset and follow instructions. Each computer will create a file with the same name so it is wise to rename them if you have several computers and want to keep them on one USB stick. From memory if you start up the computer with the USB stick plugged in it will ask you if you want to run the file to reset the password. Try it before death.
as for the Emails, its all commercial stuff so, not my problemo
