How do I deal with email sent from a deceased's apparently hacked account?

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Summary: It's troubling enough to experience the loss of a friend or a loved one, but to then get email from them thereafter can be very disturbing.

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I can totally understand that this would be a deeply disturbing event - regardless of the cause.

Unfortunately, I don't have much good news. There are things to try, and things to understand.

And, sadly, some things to prepare for.

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I certainly don't mean this to be flippant, but regaining access to a hacked email account when you're alive is difficult enough - in fact it's often nearly impossible when it comes to free services. Needless to say, when you as a third party attempt to regain control or close someone else's account - alive or dead - account security measures require that the email provider be even more cautious.

Often those security measures make it practically impossible to close someone else's account, no matter the reason.

Let's back up and first consider what may have happened.

In all honesty, the most likely cause of the email was simply that there is someone, somewhere, with whom the departed entrusted his email password. It may not be the family, but there could easily be someone he trusted. You didn't indicate the nature of the email contents, but I'd look at that as a start to see if you can identify who might have sent the message.

Naturally, the account could have been hacked at some point. It's unclear exactly how, but if the email was sent only to people that could reasonably be expected to appear in your late friends address book, this could be the case.

It's important to remember that the email might not have come from that account at all. Spammers, for example, regularly spoof the "From:" address on email to make it appear as if it's coming from one address when in fact that email address and account had nothing to do with it. This is actually fairly easy, and could certainly be done intentionally to perhaps harass you and your friends acquaintances.

And again, not knowing the contents of the message you received, it may well be garden variety spam with a spoofed "From:" address.

Regardless of how it happened, the real question is what to do?

It's unclear what is and is not legal. But on a more practical side, it's even less clear what is and is not going to be considered worthy of spending scarce law enforcement resources.

If the email you got contains true harassment, attempts to scam you out of money or other clearly illegal things, then I would in fact contact your local law enforcement agencies. It might take a few calls to find the right contact, though unfortunately there may not be a "right contact" as not all agencies are equipped to handle cyber-crime. Depending on the nature of the email it might be worth trying, though.

You can try contacting your late friends ISP or email service provider, but as I said I don't really hold out a lot of hope here. These services need to be extra cautious so that people can't just run around accessing or closing accounts because they claim that the legitimate account holder is dead. If you can even find someone to help, expect this to be a difficult process.

By now you can probably guess that I'm not very hopeful of actually regaining or closing your friends account. It's possible, but in my opinion very unlikely.

In your shoes, I would do this: ignore the email and move on. If you continue to get email from this account, set up an inbox rule to immediately delete these messages when they arrive.

And I would advise the rest of the family to do the same.

It's not what we might consider the most just, or right solution - but it's by far the most practical and least time consuming.

Finally, take a moment to learn something from this as well.

The fact that no one in this person's family has access to the account is a problem. We should all take care to entrust someone with emergency access - if for no other reason than to go in and disable or delete the information in the account in situations like this.

Related:

• Someone's sending from my email address! How do I stop them?! Email spoofing is rampant. Spammers often send email that looks like it came from you. And there's little you can do about it.

• I closed my email account, but people are still getting email from it. Why? Closing an email account seems like a logical solution to an account getting hacked, but unfortunately it doesn't address all the possible issues.

• What happens when I die? With all the digital data we take great care to secure, we need to consider who might need access to it and how if we're not around to unlock it.

Article C3825 - August 1, 2009