What Happens To Your Inbox After You Die?

What Happens To Your Inbox After You Die?

Saving that parting email from your first love in your inbox? Well, chances are, after you pass away , your spouse and the entire family will know about the long held secret.
    This is because web email services like hotmail and gmail do not let users specify what should happen to their messages when they die
     In fact , email services owned by internet giants like Google and Microsoft have a policy of keeping your data after you die and letting your next to kin or the executor of your estate access it.
     These services can hold tens of thousands of messages. Accounts with Google's Gmail can hold uo to 7GB --- or roughly 70,000 emails with a small to medium picture attached to each and they archive the messages you have written as well as received.
      When it comes to deleting the data, Microsoft's Hotmail will remove an account if it is inactive for 270 days, while Gmail leaves the responsibility to the next of kin.
       Of the top three providers, only yahoo! refuses to supply emails to anyone after the user has died.
        The user's next of kin can ask for the account to be closed, but cannot gain access to it. A Yahoo! spokesperson said the only exception to this rule would be if the user specified otherwise in their will. Meanwhile, social-net-working site Facebook has recently publisized a feature called memorialization that let's the family deceased users keep their profile page online as a virtual tribute.
        Turning a profile into a memorial will remove sensitive information from the page and restrict access to the deceased's friends. The family will not be allowed to login to the account or access private messages, but can request that it be taken down.
        MySpace, on the other hand says it addresses the issue of family access to sensitive data on a "case by case basis".
        A spokesperson for MySpace could not rule out letting a user's next of kin log into their profile - potentially giving them access to private messages. There is no way for users to tell MySpace that they don't want this to happen, however the site said it was "a good idea that we are exploring".