Mailer Daemon / Failed Delivery Test For Inactive Accounts

[understandastar]

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 ideaThere are currently 22,025,963 accounts that are not active in any way

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Speaking as a fellow user here, not in my official capacity -- I would be seriously peeved if LiveJournal did not also announce any plans for deletion in several different places as well as quietly sending an email. I would want an LJ inbox notice, a news notification, a front page and login page notification, an interstitial popup, and perhaps even a notice in the navigation strip.

The email itself should say that the email is being sent to all accounts, and if you possess another account for which you did not get that email, you should check your email address and make certain you can receive email, and that bouncebacks are being used to flag accounts for deletion. A single bounceback should also not be enough; if someone does have problems with their address at the wrong time, that shouldn't lose them their account.

[dougs]

... and a mechanism for any user to say "account X shouldn't be deleted" for any account X.

[matgb]

I agree with this--I have a few now deceased friends on here, and others that have stopped using the site, whose old content I still sometimes want to go back to.

I'd want to be able to declare "I want this account to stay" or something, even if it's technically nowt to do with me.

Having said that, the only reason my username is now MatGB on virtually every blog platform out there is because matb already had an unused account when I signed up, there're a lot of dead/unused accounts out there.

[fiddlingfrog]

Huh. I always thought it was for "Mat from Great Britain".

[matgb]

Added bonus. Matthew Grant Bowles. But the GB is actually useful when blogging &c

[azurelunatic]

I'd think that in any automatic deletion plan, memorial accounts would be preserved.

[charliemc]

Yes, agreed.