What happens to my domain, website and email when I die?

There was an article around here yesterday that confirm your thoughts.

They did got access to old email and services via those email

https://inti.io/p/when-privacy-expires-how-i-got-access

When my dad died, no one renewed his domain, [last name].com, and some domain squatter bought it. A few years later the squatter noticed that I owned [last name].net and offered to sell it to me. I didn't respond and I guess they figured out that an obscure last name isn't worth anything and let it expire. I should probably buy it.

If you want your content to live beyond you, you would need to set up some kind of trust to conserve it. Some investments that would make enough money to continue to pay for maintenance, probably someone would need to keep an eye on it too as hosting companies won't last forever, so things will need moving eventually.

Generally practically nothing we do lasts forever though, you can take measures to resist that for a while, but ultimately nearly everything is forgotten

The email is stored on a server. The domain DNS points the appropriate URL at your matching email configuration. Someone registering your domain doesn't give them information about the previous DNS configuration, name servers, and certainly not your server cpanel login credentials. So no, they wouldn't get access to your emails. They could re-create the same email address using their new setup, but all of the previous email contents would still be sitting on your server. Someone could potentially use the matching email address to retrieve account resets from services you're registered to, but they would need to know your exact email address and there would probably still be some additional roadblocks.

Regarding your blog and that sort of stuff. If you want it to persist after you die, then you should will it to someone, along with renewal information, admin access, and probably some money to cover the expenses. If you use a password manager like LastPass then you can set someone up as an emergency contact, and they can retrieve all of your logins after you die. They basically send a retrieval request, and if you don't respond to block it in the given time period, it allows them to log in as if they were you.

I started blogging in 1997 and still do today, and I would love for my writing and posts to live on after me, so I've been thinking more and more about this issue... Right now my idea is to write up a document about what needs to happen for it to continue, and hope my children consider it a worthwhile effort.

What do you care? You are dead.

In general, everything will stick around as long as you paid for it. Your email account and your web site will probably be unceremoniously deleted once the money runs out, and the domain name itself will be freed up. While you use your domain to point to your web site and your email account, they won't be associated forever: Once they expire, the name is available for someone else to fill it with new content, not to get access to your existing content.

Oooooor: You could bequeath all your online assets to a family member in your will (don't forget to give them all relevant passwords), possibly along with some money to keep paying for the domain registration, email- and web hosting.

You are correct. Once a domain registration expires, anyone will be able to register that domain again. If they set up a mail server, they'll be able to make email inboxes to receive emails sent to that domain.

If you have a website or blog that you're hosting on the domain, once the resignation expires, the server might still be up but nobody will be able to access that site via its domain name from the public Internet using that domain name any more, as the A/AAAA records pointing to that server will be erased. If there is nobody to pay the hosting bills, then the server will eventually be taken offline and all the data will be deleted. If you self-host, the data will stay on that server's disk(s) until your heirs sell or recycle it.

If you want someone to continue running your server and keeping up your domain registrations, you will need to arrange that before you die. Otherwise, it will all likely be whisked away into the ether.

Most domain and web hosting plans expire when no one pays to renew them.

One thing you could do is put your work under a free license. That would allow people to copy it which should make sure that your work will be preserved by others.

Depends on which country you live and which country you die.

You'd have to self-host anything you want to have up "forever", and that hosting would have to continue after your death by whatever means you set up. In reality what you'd want to do if you want to preserve your digital life is create physical back-ups of it so that family or friends can revisit it after you are gone. If everything is up on the web, and that's it, then it will all be deleted as soon as the money stops coming in to whomever is hosting it.

The same goes for your email, though to a lesser extent. If you have a gmail account, I believe there was a kerfuffle about them deleting untouched accounts a few years ago, and I don't know if they ever did or not, but your account with whomever you use will persist until such time as they deem it not to.

You need a succession plan for your death.

That can either be a will, a conservatorship, a trust. It can just be a bit warden account that has emergency access from a trusted friend, a lawyer, family member.

You can ensure your site is backed up by archive.org, and your online accounts are well documented in your password manager such as bitwarden.

Alternatively if you have the means, setting up a foundation that has direct access to the content and making yourself an officer with somebody else being next in line would make things easier for a transition. Depending on the depth of your content.

Sit down, and think about your goals, what do you want your legacy to be. And make sure you're achieving those goals. It could simply be printing out all of your output and making a book, filing with the library of Congress releasing it as an ebook. Making sure it persists in the Gutenberg press etc

I used to once believe, that a lot of what is on the internet lasts forever. It was a little naive to think, because over the course of my time online, I've seen things that I thought would last, ended up not lasting.

I would sometimes cross-search old usernames of mine because I do get around online. I can only now see my past accounts that I've made at least 5 years ago. Only 2 accounts that I recall, are 10+ years old when it used to be a bit more. It tells me that things will shut down eventually and it'll take down many accounts with it.

Unless you are on platforms hosted by Google or Microsoft by using their services, it's going to last for a long time because they're a little too big to just simply vanish overnight.

Your best option is to just back up what you can and if you remember to before you die, make arrangements for preservation purposes with instructions to those you'd want in on it.

everything you describe would happen. unless you start a foundation to continue your blog only the internet archive would have it.

I've set up a cascading set of credentials that start with a single piece of paper in my desk. I've made sure all my kids know what that piece of paper is and what it's for. They can choose to use it to unlock all my secrets and wealth or not. Up to them.

One idea I had was to randomly put stuff into content that might pay off later. Write random sentences that say things like "saw Tom today, people are saying his brother is the chosen one." Or "lot of traffic today, heard it was because this guy was doing crazy miracles and declared himself king".

Tactius is going to be read forever because he interviewed a Christian one time and wrote one sentence.

Sorry for yapping, but this is a very perplexing problem that even we as a collective civilization struggle with. For example: how do you keep future generations out of nuclear waste vaults on a 1000/2000/1`000'000 year scale (we don't even talk about infinity, because it is surprise infinite times larger), because we cannot predict how even our language and (more than that) our culture would look like. One text/symbol/pictogram could tell something completely different to a person 10000 years in the future, than to a current-day one.

For me, the most interesting part was the conclusion: instead of using static language or pictograms printed on the walls (although some menacing skulls wouldn't hurt) they instead opted out to a more dynamic and "updatable" forms of media - myths and legends (and maybe also a church, but I don't remember). And that is not as ridiculous as it sounds - some of the myths from the past that we can read, like, right now, were created more than a couple thousand years ago (some even more than 10000). Also, an obvious note, but they weren't created in a modern language. So this means that everything around them basically died/changed: the author, many many many of the ones who retold them, their first written forms, the printing company that first printed them, even the language (basically, transmission protocol) on which it was created is dead.

So (if we get back to the original scope of the question) that means that you basically have two choices:

1. Make your web site out of stone and hide it somewhere around Antarctica.

"+":

• the decay would be greatly slow down
• no one is going to (or, could) delete/destroy it

"-":

• no one is probably going to see it for a looong time (and when the do, they might not understand a thing)

2. Not be silly.

The thought of everything that you do/have/see breaking to dust is equally scary and relaxing - but it is true. No matter how much you paid for your domain name, or how your server is getting power out of solar, self-backups and self-repairs - everything eventually would break, catch fire, explode and turn off.

Or rather it will, without someone maintaining it. Because the only man-made things that live forever are doing so on the power of human resilience and preservation. It's like this ancient art of a horse on some hill in the UK, that would be erased by the tides of history a loong time ago, but is still here because a couple of english mates have a bucket of white paint and some free time on tuesday.

So if you think about how this site that you poured your heart and soul into would instantly vanish as soon as you're dead, remember: as long as someone cares and loves what you do (and with some coordination), the thing that you made would transcend the boundaries of some hostings, domains and internet protocols (and maybe even the language itself) and live in the minds of people, truly, forever.