It’s a topic that has been lightly touched on several times over the years. The tales of families trying to regain control of deceased family members emails or blogs etc, but it has never been put forth that a serious solution is needed.

With the passing of mom, I was lucky in that she used the same password for everything and that I knew the password. Allowing me to go in and take care of things, archive emails etc. For example, my family has a little used family mailing list through YahooGroups and I wanted to reclaim control of it for our use but I didn’t want the red tape that would be required to get through for them to take care of it. So I instead logged in as her and switched control as needed.

There is something eerie about logging in to her email or to her yahoo groups and seeing the pile of messages from her knitting group, or things like that. I was struck with the question - do I remove her from these groups? Or do I let her account sit there? It’s a very deep and philosophical question.

On the one hand, many probably don’t even notice the idle account on the list, but on the other hand I don’t want mom’s email address continually getting these emails because there is a sense that you should take care of these sort of things, just like stopping mail to a vacant house. Gmail will continue to expand her box and it’s unlikely her account will ever fill up, but there is just something about it that bothers me.

So how should sites like Google, Yahoo, Facebook or Myspace handle the death of members? What about World of Warcraft players or other MMOs? Or on an even more important level, how about domain registrars? It must be a solution which is fool-proof safe from pranksters as well. Is it simply a procedure for handling the submission of death certificates?

The libertarian in me cries out in pain as I consider this suggestion: Is it something the government should regulate? I need to think more about this.