Today, Collin and I looked through our email accounts and found passwords to our online services, bank statements, financial information, contact information for just about everyone we know, and a whole lot more. When someone passes away, being able to access the email account of the deceased can be a great help to the survivors since important information can be viewed, contacts can be notified, and future emails can be retrieved. Unless you have the login information, obtaining access to an email account of the deceased typically requires death certificates, powers of attorney, and long waiting periods for all the paper work to go through.
For instance, here are the steps necessary to obtain access to a Gmail account of the deceased:
1. Your full name and contact information, including a verifiable email address.
2. The Gmail address of the individual who passed away.
3a. The full header from an email message that you have received at your verifiable email address, from the Gmail account in question. (To obtain the header from a message in Gmail, open the message, click ‘More options,’ then click ‘Show original.’ Copy everything from ‘Delivered- To:’ through the ‘References:’ line. To obtain headers from other webmail or email providers, please refer to http://www.spamcop.com/help_with_headers/)
3b. The entire contents of the message.
4. A copy of the death certificate of the deceased.
5. A copy of the document that gives you Power of Attorney over the Gmail account.
6. If you are the parent of the individual, please send us a copy of the Birth Certificate if the Gmail account owner was under the age of 18. In this case, Power of Attorney is not required.
In order to make the whole process infinitely simpler and quicker for your family if something happens to you, we have a special “Passwords” category built right into all YouDeparted accounts. Just like every other type of entry, your Passwords are encrypted with military-grade 256 bit AES, so you can rest assured they are safely and securely stored in your YouDeparted.com account. Recording your email passwords and designating who should receive them is very easy to do with YouDeparted, and will ensure that your family will not have to deal with complicated paperwork and waiting periods.
This entry was posted
on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
and is filed under Planning Ahead, Advice.
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