Are you tired of us all? Did you ever get the feeling it would be better to just delete yourself from the entire Internet, but you instinctively know it's not possible? Well there is now hope in a new app called deseat.me
Basically the app will find all the places on the Internet where you have an account and feed the list back to you along with links to the appropriate account deletion pages. I've not tried it but it's hard to believe ANY app could find all the hundreds of places at which I have an account. But, even if it only gets 90%, it might be worth it
I don't see how it would be possible, especially for folks who have used numerous ISPs over the years, or those who use public WiFi stations.
Heck, I don't even remember the names of some of the early Dial-Up services I used to use back in the day, and of course we never used our real names on-line either.
I can think of one scenario. They search out your e-mail address and see if it appears on any of the social networks in their database. I'm certain that would cover a vast majority of the places you have signed onto. It's the same technique a hacker would use to break into accounts you might set up in multiple locations. IP addresses are irrelevant considering they are often dynamic. I'm guessing it would be easier to discover your login credentials than it would be to find all the places you might have registered over the decades. Some web sites I took part in are totally obscure. The biggest flaw that I can imagine are the so called "partners" with whom many web sites share you information. You could be removed from Farcebook, for example, the you would still be on the lists of all their partners.
Well, I've used the same e-mail address now for over a decade, so I guess they could track me by searching for it.
I always hated having to change my e-mail address every time an ISP went belly up, or I had to move to another one for one reason or another. I've almost considered changing my e-mail to my own domain name, this way it could move with me from web host to web host and not rely on my ISP to handle my e-mail.
The thing is, I'm not sure if one can move their e-mail from host to host as easily as moving our web sites.
I never really looked into it much.
My late sister used to change her telephone number and e-mail address more than once a year.
Drove me nuts trying to keep up with her. I always had to wait until she e-mailed me to know where to send an e-mail back to.
If she had a new phone number, she would give it to me over three separate e-mails, never all in one e-mail.
My bad ... sorry about that. You need to click on the link in the article to get you to the buttons.
and ... Gary, you know, of course, that your e-mail is handled by a server. If your ISP goes belly up, most likely their e-mail server, and all your mail, goes with it. It's pretty much the same deal as with web site hosts. When you register your domain name it ends up being an record in a DNS server that points to the hardware (IP address) on which your files are stored. Moving to a new host changes the hardware (IP address) and the DNS record has to be updated. Soooo, I'm guessing you have to get the old provider to send the files to the new provider if you change hosting services. The new provider has their own DNS server which they will update for you.
I don't use web-mail, so all of my e-mail messages inbound and outbound are stored in my own computer, and backed up locally. So I wouldn't have to worry about an old host moving my e-mails to a new host.
My wife uses web-mail, and usually deletes her read messages, so cannot go back to any she deleted.
Even when I was with an ISP who had web-mail, I still had mine forwarded through a pop-server to my e-mail reader.
The only problem using e-mail over web-mail is you cannot just plop down anywhere to view your mail. It has to be done from the computer you currently have your e-mail reader active, if you wan't everything to stay in order.
This doesn't mean I cannot go look at my e-mail using a web browser and view it on-line from any computer, I just don't mark it as read so it will download through the pop-server to my computer with my e-mail reader later when I access it.
A number of years ago, right after I moved down here and was messing with servers myself, I had my e-mail directed to my own IP address. This was all well and good until that computer went belly up on me, and I had forgot how to set up a new server by then. So now I just stick with using the ISP's mailboxes, hi hi...
Your computer, as well as anybody's popmail/SMTP server, has a unique IP address. That address is derived from a DNS server that translates your domain name to an IP address. Thus, all your e-mail, now and before, gets to you via the domain name system server. Those DNS servers must know your IP address or you won't get any mail at all. When you had somebody else handle the incoming/outgoing mail, using their IP address was how your mail found you. Hosting on your own simply made your local computer the IP destination. Thus, changing mail servers (local or remote) would cut off your mail supply. Web mail works the same way; the exception being the IP address in the DNS server belongs to the website hosting your mail.
I'd be interested in knowing what software you used to receive e-mail directly on your computer instead of popping it off somebody's server. I thought you would still need a client to read incoming and send outgoing mail.
It was so long ago Yogi, I don't remember exactly. It was when I first went back to checking out Linux, and I installed the LAMP server OS on an older but robust computer. I think the server program was called something like Squirrel Mail. This only worked because I did have my own domain name I paid for, but could not use it when I moved over to Comcast as my Cable ISP. So rather than let it go to waste, I used it for my server computer.
I still used Eudora to read my own mail off my own server though.
About seven months later my domain name expired and I forgot to renew it. It wasn't automatic by a maintainer like it is today. In fact, I just got notice my domain expires and will automatically renew, and to check my payment method to make sure it has not expired also. Did that yesterday! The CC I'm using does expire in September, so I'll have to remember to update it before next year.
I honestly don't remember how I do something from week to week. If I need to change something on my computer, I have to look up on-line how to do it each time. The same thing applies to programs I use as well, like accounting software or spreadsheets. Once I have them set up, by the next time I need to set up another one, I don't remember how. Sign of Olde Age, hi hi...
Now that I'm thinking about it, and if I recall correctly, my e-mail stayed on a pop-server somewhere until my server dialed up their server then it downloaded everything into my server. Once it did this, it deleted it off the pop-server, so if something went wrong at my end, there was no getting it back again. OR, this was most likely after I got Cable Internet, wait yes it was after I got Cable, so my server was live all the time. That's why I had a domain name that was not in use.
As an aside. I used my St. Louis ISP for a long time after moving down here, but had a local phone number I could use for my dial-up. Then, once I was connected to US Bank, I could then connect to my ISP using Eudora and it would download my e-mail.
It was when my St. Louis ISP started having a lot of problems, and after I got my Cable Internet from Comcast, and a new e-mail address from them, that I still wanted access to my old e-mail account.
I know it was really confusing back then, because I had websites on my St. Louis ISPs service, just like I did here on Comcast. I only had one website that used my own domain name on the St. Louis ISP, and got my business e-mail through it. So when they shut down suddenly, is while I was playing with the server and managed to get my e-mail to my domain landing in my own server. How I did it, I honestly don't remember anymore.
Like now, I know my present web hosting service has e-mail which I get through my domain name, and which I rarely if ever check. The only accounts are like Admin@mydomainname, or Webmaster@mydomainname. One reason I don't check there for mail is I have it set to forward to my regular e-mail account at Comcast.
This is why I had asked, if I set up my e-mail account using my domain name on this host provider. If I move to another host, using the same domain name of course, if my e-mail would follow along, or is it a service the host provides for its clients.
That kind of stuff is way over my head!
This is why I had asked, if I set up my e-mail account using my domain name on this host provider. If I move to another host, using the same domain name of course, if my e-mail would follow along, or is it a service the host provides for its clients.
That kind of stuff is way over my head!
There are a couple things going on which may not be obvious. First of all, the domain name is just that, a name. It has no physical representation. That makes it portable, kind of. Your mail is routed to a physical server by a DNS server out on the cloud. Many ISP's have their own DNS servers so that you normally would not have to worry about setting it up. They do it for you. The set up is simple in that it consists of a table with domain names and their equivalent IP addresses. So, when a piece of e-mail hits the Internet, the DNS server knows where to send it. After looking up the IP in the DNS table, your message is forwarded to a e-mail server, which usually has two additional servers: a pop server for incoming and a SMTP server for outgoing.
Reading the mail is just a matter of connecting to the e-mail server via some software on your computer. In your case you have downloaded the e-mail onto your desktop and your e-mail client sorts things out per your specifications. It looks like this:
SENDER --> DNS server --> Internet --> e-mail server ==> POP server ==> Gary's computer
When you send an e-mail the path is similar:
Gary's computer ==> SMTP server --> DNS server --> Internet --> e-mail server ==> RECIPIENT
When you change ISP's, it's the e-mail server leg that changes. In many cases the DNS server changes too, but it is very possible for you to have a third party DNS service (OpenDNS, e.g.) All you need to do in order to keep getting and sending via your private domain name is to tell your ISP (or third party) to update their DNS server with your new ISP's IP address.
I could be wrong but I read your comments above and understood you were able to bypass the e-mail server and receive messages directly off the Internet. If that is what you actually did, it would be great to know how it was done. But, I'm guessing it only looked that way and was happening per my flow chart above.
I thought I could make this process a little clearer for you, but now that I review it I'm not sure I succeeded.
Although I no longer understand my own notes, I dug out my notebook to see what it was I may have done.
It appears I had to install IMAP on my server, and use a Mail Fetch plug-in to pull my mail off a POP3 server.
It was SquirrelMail I was using, but I did not use it to read my own mail, I used Eudora to read and send mail.
Eudora used Comcasts SMTP server to send mail out. But I did not yet have a Comcast e-mail address.
I'm fairly certain, since my St. Louis ISP set me up with a US Bank Dial-Up account to my St. Louis ISP, when I switched over to Cable Internet, I connected to US Bank's server to fetch my mail using Squirrel.
Once it was set up, it did all this automatically in the background, and I just used Eudora to read and send mail.
I'm still not sure how on earth I did this, because Eudora read my inbound mail from the Squirrel IMAP server. So maybe it functioned as a POP3 server? I do know other people could establish e-mail accounts on my server, but I never allowed that, as they would have had to use my domain name as part of their e-mail address.
It could very well be I could have connected directly to a POP3 server at US Bank using only Eudora. But by the time that computer started acting up, I already had a couple of e-mail accounts on Comcast, the same ones I still have today.
IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is the counterpart of POP3 mail. The former allows for reading your mail directly from the e-mail server. POP3 downloads it from the server first for you to read on your local machine. Plus, it looks as if you were your own server at some point. I think you've done everything possible to do.
Eudora was the first e-mail client I ever used back in the Windows 98 good ol' days. I had three or four accounts at various places and Eudora seemed to know how to set it all up without much intervention on my part. Good thing because I didn't know much about what I was doing back then. But, alas, Eudora didn't last as long as Win98. A for-profit company bought them out and gave me a free copy of their commercial client just because I was a previous Eudora user. I had to get a license and all, but I didn't have to pay. Unfortunately the new version wasn't as user friendly as Eudora and I found something else to carry me through my extended use of the OS. I don't remember what that something was, but these days I've settled on Thunderbird. My throw away accounts are all web mail and, of course, the people hosting this web site also host e-mail. Several web mail vendors offer POP3 service. Microsoft's Hotmail used to charge for that which is why I didn't settle on them until it became free. Even today they have limits to the number of POP's you can use but I've only run up to the quota once or twice in all the years I've used it.
Mobile devices all have their own version of e-mail suitable for use by half blind and mentally deficient elves. The mobile apps still have a LONG way to go to emulate anything as feature rich as desktop or even web clients. But then, mobile device users generally aren't interested in the same kind of detail I prefer. Have you ever tried to read a header from a smart phone? There are times I want to know exactly from where my e-mail originates, but none of that good information seems to be available on the built in mail clients.
I'm not good with years here, and I know Arpnet already existed. But for use lowly humanoids, I'm not sure if we had e-mail before or after the BBS days. What I do know is when we installed the WANG VS mainframe at work around 1980, it had an e-mail program in it, however, it only worked if both people had their computers on. It was more like messaging than actual e-mail.
Then we had a program called PINE, which was more like e-mail, but we only used it to send and receive messages from the Wang service department.
Like many folks, I got burned by AOL when I got an account with them, around 1982. I left and got an account at a real ISP PDQ. I still remember their name too, Inlink, I'm thinking this was 1983 or 1984. They provided an entire package that included a web browser, e-mail, and a way to connect to their Archimedes System via 22.6 dial-up. I was still using our BBS service up to around the year 2003, even though I had a website on Inlink.
I never really got wrapped up in using e-mail, except for a few messages to family and friends until Eudora came out. And even though Eudora became commercial after a while, I still used the old version up until it no longer worked, then I finally decided to pay for the pro version, because I didn't like the version with the ads they gave away free.
Because I was a Ham Operator and maintained a Packet Radio Station, and most of those I talked to back then used Packet, so I set up several mailboxes. I actually used this more than e-mail.
I still have all of my old e-mail messages converted to readable text backup from those early days. But lost everything from the early Eudora I used in that era up to around 1990 when we had the flood, and my office was in the basement. Then when I converted to the paid Eudora program, all of my backups were on tape drives, and I could not recover a darn thing.
So, other than a few saved texts from before 1985, I lost everything from then up to around 2000.
I must have started using Thunderbird in February of 2008. But probably continued to use Eudora until I learned Thunderbird.
I found several test messages sent from Thunderbird to my BBS's e-mail service, dated 2/27/2008, to check to see if when I retrieved those messages in Thunderbird, they went into folders like they did on Eudora.
I wasn't to happy with Thunderbird at first, even though they said it was like Eudora, it wasn't.
So I think I continued to use both Eudora and Thunderbird, Eudora for my business e-mails, and Thunderbird for my personal e-mails, all the way up to 6/12/2011.
I found no personal e-mails saved as Eudora e-mails after 2008, but business e-mails ran up to 2011.
By the same token, my oldest Thunderbird archived business e-mail is dated 6/12/2011.
I used to delete anything not important back then too. Now, unless I send things to junk I just backup everything.
I did you g-mail and y-mail back when I could read it from them using Eudora or Thunderbird, but when they stopped that, I quit using web-mail entirely and never looked back.
I'm afraid some day we will all have to go with web-mail or cloud-mail or something we haven't even considered yet.
I just thought of something. It must have been around 2008 that I was messing around with my own server, and perhaps that is why I don't have any personal e-mails saved between 2008 and 2011. They were probably on that server and this is also when our backup system messed up royally. The frau has never forgiven me for that either! She lost hundreds of photo's when the backup system only saved LINKS back to the Hard Drive instead of making an actual copy. Even though I checked the backup to make sure everything was there, I did not move it to a different computer, so when I looked to see if something was there after running backup, it was because the link was active. Live and learn!
