It follows you into the afterlife where you are then harassed by "Want your life back?" and "You've just won 10 more years! Claim your prize now!" spam.

Your relatives inherit the inbox and they decide what should happen. Often they ignore or close the account. Other times they will respond and let people know.

The e-mail angel deletes it for you.:)

The address changes from name@host.com to name@host.god

It gets bloated with spam...

The good emails go to heaven, the bad go to the spam folder (Hell). Those with both good and bad get left in the inbox for eternity... forever living with no real destination, no tags, no folders, no replies.

It's sad, it really is. I hear their lonely cries all night long.

It becomes inactive and eventually its contents are erased for lack of use.
It can also happen that a family member will take your account and upon "fake" wishes of what you would have liked to do, they invade your facebook (from which they now have control through your e-mail) and start e-mailing people, accepting friends (that you would have never accepted) and ruin the image of who you are into what they think "you would have liked".

It's a real story. It happened to a best friend of mine. He died and his father took his account and decided to live his son's life. It was sad in more than one way.

Nothing. But does it really matter after one has died?

i think i might change my will and take it with me when i go ,as i know it is going to be hot down there ,and i want to order some air conditioning online and my provider is always got specials on so my Email address i will need .+5

it depends:


if you die and your relatives have access, they can save everything, close it down, whatever. pretend to be you in their quest to steal their identity, whatever

if you die and it's a paid account, presumably once dead you stop paying your bills and your either lose some services or the account altogether

if you die and you have a webmail account using a server that requires you to log in every so often in order to keep the account, once dead, you'll stop logging in, your account will close, and after a certain period of time, generally the name is available for recycling

if you die and you have a webmail account using a server that does not require you to log in every so often to keep the account, the account just stays there. at some point you might max out your server space, but well, the account stays active until the server goes out of business or catches on that you haven't logged in in 100 years

POP accounts--anything you've downloaded--well your computer doesn't know you've died, so it'a all still there. family or whoever your things are left to might read through it, or not (you can always password protect it if you want to take your e-mail secrets to the grave).

basically, the e-mail account lives on, until terminated, the e-mails live on until deleted, unless they are on your harddrive, in which case, if no one uses the computer, and it's just saved, your computer, with your files and emails still intact could be sold at a garage sale a few hundred years from now. some families are like that, they just keep things in the attic, because they plan to use them, then they're outdated but don't go through it, then it's a generation later and that's what they have of their family history and then a few generations later, someone goes into the attic, and says, "we could make a fortune off of this old crap. I wonder what distant relative it belonged to"


but, I don't think it will really matter to you, you'll be dead...you'll have more pressing issues