Retrieving old email accounts?

Simcut · 11-04-2005, 01:09

Hey there,

a long while ago I had to close some old email accounts due to being spam attacked, thing is though, I am quite sure that some people are still trying to contact me on them, wouldnt suprise me at all. I tried going to email options to re-create the accounts and it wont let me, anything I can do at all guys? these accounts have been close for over a year now, I thought NTL allow you to get them back?

Please can someone tell me what I could do.... these surely cant be irretrievable.

Cheers,

carlingman · 11-04-2005, 01:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by Simcut

Hey there,

a long while ago I had to close some old email accounts due to being spam attacked, thing is though, I am quite sure that some people are still trying to contact me on them, wouldnt suprise me at all. I tried going to email options to re-create the accounts and it wont let me, anything I can do at all guys? these accounts have been close for over a year now, I thought NTL allow you to get them back?

Please can someone tell me what I could do.... these surely cant be irretrievable.

Cheers,

Tech support should be able to tell you if they have been closed or whether someone else has re registered them as I believe they are frozen for 6 months or so.

Failing that as I am guessing these are not the primary account then maybe ask them to e-mail the password to you which I think they send to the primary account which you still have ???

Simcut · 11-04-2005, 01:23

Thanks for the reply first of all.

Thing is, my original account was closed as it was in my dad's name and my mum and dad seperated.... the main account holder is my Mum now, and those accounts including her old one were lost when we swapped over. Moving house didnt help matters either.

So I just ring Tech Support and ask if I can re-open them? Surely they have records of the original account owners of those email addresses and I could confirm my OLD address details etc?

Cheers.

carlingman · 11-04-2005, 01:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Simcut

Thanks for the reply first of all.

Thing is, my original account was closed as it was in my dad's name and my mum and dad seperated.... the main account holder is my Mum now, and those accounts including her old one were lost when we swapped over. Moving house didnt help matters either.

So I just ring Tech Support and ask if I can re-open them? Surely they have records of the original account owners of those email addresses and I could confirm my OLD address details etc?

Cheers.

Dont quote me on this but from memory once the accounts are relinquished back to NTL they hold them for some time i.e. 6 months and then allow them to be re registered.

For example if you had the e-mail john.smith@ntlworld.com then obviously there are going to be more than one john smith in the country and it would therefore be possible that someone else has re registered the accounts.

However if your email accounts were for a not so common name etc it is unlikely they would have been taken up.

Only people that would be able to tell this is the Tech Support Guys or someone with access to their e-mail systems.

Out of interest though what happens if you send e-mail to these accounts, does it bounce ???

If it bounces it would indicate that these accounts are suspended by NTL etc.

However it if gets through it could be someone is asking themself who the hell is this guy sending me all this crap etc

Try sending a test e-mail while you wait for Tech Support to open.

Simcut · 11-04-2005, 01:50

why didnt I think of that earlier, I've just tried sending an email now.. using google, strangely my ntlworld email addy currently wont let me send the emails, I get a msg about "invalid recipient" but when i send an email via google I dont get a delivery notification failure for simcut@ntlworld.com
__________________

aha!

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 10): 550 Invalid recipient:

on all of them....

simbr · 11-04-2005, 14:06

The failure means that no-one else is using the address.
When an username is removed from an account it remains locked to that account for 6 months to prevent someone else registering it in case you want it back. In this case the someone else is you, but the system doesn't know that since you are using a different account. You will have to contact customer or technical support to see if they can unlock or migrate the username for you.

Raistlin · 11-04-2005, 14:30

I thought that once an email address had been used by one person it was never then transferred to anybody else?

Imagine a situation where I am receiving confidential mail to an email address. For whatever reason I then have to close that email address.

6 months later somebody else registers the email address.

One of the companies that had been emailing me makes an administrative cock-up and all of a sudden all of my confidential mail is going to somebody else, with no way of me tracing it!!

**Paul M** · 11-04-2005, 14:33

Nope, e-mail addresses are not unique in that manner and never have been.

Simcut · 28-02-2007, 18:55

Sorry to bump this one but those email addresses are still not available to use :-(

Toto · 28-02-2007, 19:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by Simcut

Sorry to bump this one but those email addresses are still not available to use :-(

Your going to need to speak to technical support, assuming you pass a security check as they are the only ones who can check, or raise an escalation ticket to get the addresses checked.

One thing you may not be aware, is that a number of popular email addresses may have been reserved for spam trap purposes.

Virgin Media on the ex-ntl side use the Brightmail spam filter system, and part of that system is reserving a number of popular email addresses purely for that purpose.

It may be the address you had in the past has now been reserved for use by that system.

Hope that helps.