Best practices for disabling email accounts

[Darren Pilgrim]

On 2003.09.12 12:58:29 -0400, John Capo <jc at irbs.com> wrote:

> Quoting Blake Swensen (blake at pyramus.com):
> > Many of you are in the same boat, where customers fall behind and 
> > collections letters still do not seem to grab their attention.
> > 
> > Short of changing passwords, does anyone have a best practices
> > method of temporarily preventing access to email boxes temporarily.
> > In most of these cases, once the customer has paid, I would like to
> > turn back on the email boxes.
> > 
> 
> Reject incoming email but allow access to the mailbox so that your
> customer can retrieve mail you have already accepted.  Rejecting
> further email notifies the senders that the email was not delivered
> and they can contact your customer by other means.

You have to notify the customer that the account contents will be
forfeit if the account goes long enough without payment.  Such notice
is usually part of the service contract so that you don't have to deal
with contacting a scarce customer later on and you have an official
document that gets you out of lawsuits.  This is common practice with
self-storage lockers, leased mailboxes, etc.  There's even a similar
clause for most apartments.