Before You Depart:
Preparing For The Unexpected

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.

If you have a child in the military, or if you have a parent in the military, it is essential that both of you have your affairs in order before you are sent overseas or even to a military base far from your home.

If you are overseas, and a family member should die, it will be much easier if all of your important papers were filed in the same place.  YouDeparted, for example.

By that same token, if you should die, it would be much easier for your parents to take care of your affairs if all of your important papers were filed in the same place.  YouDeparted, for example.

Heaven forbid that anything should happen to anyone, overseas or at home.  But isn’t it just logical, and considerate, for us all to put all of our essential paperwork in one place, to make things a little easier for our executor and survivors?  Trying to put someone’s financial details together from scratch is hard enough if we are right there.  Trying to do this if either party is far from home, especially in a foreign country, is almost unthinkable.

Try to think about it, however.  Don’t make things even harder on the people you love; store all of your important papers, passwords, policies, etc, right here on YouDeparted.

Your survivors will appreciate your thoughtfulness.  Plus, you’ll get your own way in the end.