Mailer Daemon / Failed Delivery Test For Inactive Accounts
Title
Mailer Daemon / Failed Delivery Test For Inactive Accounts
Short, concise description of the idea
Send a mass e-mail to inactive accounts. For those where a mailer daemon / failed delivery message is received back, flag the journal for deletion.
Full description of the idea
There are currently 22,025,963 accounts that are not active in any way (calculated using http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml). Many, of course, are names that people want but can't under the current method of treating inactive accounts.
So, why not do some sort of test to see if an account is truly inactive, abandoned, and does not have a proper owner?
My suggestion is for LiveJournal to put together a population of inactive journals. (Start with no comments / posts / few log-ins.) For the inactive journals, send a mass e-mail......a friendly one that says how we've missed you, how to delete accounts if they are no longer wanted, it's LiveJournal's birthday, etc.. (And as pointed out in the comments, this should be advertised all over the place so users know this is occurring.)
For any journal for which a "Mailer Daemon" message is recieved (a bounce message / failed delivery message), flag the account for deletion.
If there is no "owner" over the account, then that account should be deleted / purged and then made available to others.
An ordered list of benefits
- Cleaning up abandoned accounts
- Make names available to those who want it
- More revenue for LiveJournal with rename tokens
- Bring back old members/people who forgot they had accounts
- Good for privacy and security of members, who may have information up on their old accounts that they would like to get rid of but can't (don't have access to e-mail, can't remember password, etc.)
- Potential that an "abandoned" account is someone who died (depending on the populations the e-mail is sent to)
- Someone may want their account but forgot to update their e-mail address