Dead man’s mail

Password protection tools are the need of the hour

You see it happening every day in the newspaper. Brawls over succession rights; each one alluding to the old man’s will, prepared and kept in an iron safe. But what if instead of the safe, the will was concealed in the geezer’s inbox, and one doesn’t even have the password!

The thought hasn’t raised alarm yet, but as the world becomes heavily dependent on password protected files, spreadsheets, and tonnes of data like address book contacts, financial correspondence et al is stored on the email, the issue gains ground. Most of us rely on memory, but what if you pop off? Phoof goes all that information, lost to them email providers. So, what does your kin do next?

Many e-mail providers such as Yahoo, Rediff, Google and MSN are becoming the subject of ire of relatives, as they refuse to violate end-user privacy contracts with the user and disclose individual passwords of the deceased. A significant episode was of a father of a US Marine, who was killed in Iraq. The court forced Yahoo! to provide the father with his son’s email password.

Instead of the tormenting court trials, there are technological solutions that one can resort to. Explains Todd Cochrane, CEO, RawVoice (original content providers for podcasting), “I personally use a program called KeePass; my wife has the master password for that application and it is replicated on my backup drives which are in a safety deposit box. As we rotate that drive each month, the new passwords are archived there for safe keeping. I feel pretty well protected.” KeePass is essentially a free open-source password safe, where passwords are stored in highly-encrypted databases, which can be unlocked with one master key or key-disk. There are other free password managers like EZ Password Secure, Password Fortress, DiskLogon; the last one even helps remember passwords that have been configured for USB drives, flash cards et al. Surely, one must invest in such tools. The future is much safer for the paranoid!