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

[dawna]

I would only support some sort of "test" for accounts that have not been logged in to in over 5 years and have no signifigant amount of entries in them. Bounced mail isn't always the best way to tell as lots of email accounts sometimes bounce mail for one reason or another.

Also, keep in mind that just because an account looks abandoned to you doesn't mean it is. I actually have an account that I log into occasionally for reading purposes and I know many people do the same and to anyone who went there it looks abandoned. So that has to be factored in really.

[lady_angelina]

THIS. You said it better than I did.

[charliemc]

Exactly.

Plus, as has been mentioned in the past, there are journals for DECEASED people that it would be nice to keep, even though they aren't ever going to be 'active' again...

[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".

[koulagirl666]

I am not sure how you get from flagging to deleting. How do you intend determining whether the account has an owner?

I don't think there is any good way to implement this without making a lot of people upset. Imagine the confusion of someone coming back from hiatus to find someone else's entries in their journal, or someone who didn't have internet access and just got it back or is borrowing a computer.

[lady_angelina]

Absolutely not. There are reasons that an otherwise active email account might come up as undeliverable, such as fail on the ISP's/email provider's end. Or a user never pays attention to LJ emails and has never bothered to update their email address.

But whatever the reason for the failed delivery, summarily flagging such an account for deletion is just not worth the risk.

[mskala]

Before your suggestion is implemented: Livejournal can tell potential advertisers "We have 24 million users!"

After your suggestion is implemented: Livejournal can tell potential advertisers "We have 2 million users!"

That's why your suggestion won't be implemented. It doesn't matter whether it would make things better for existing users. Users are not Livejournal's real customers.

[turlough]

Exactly!