Messages from Beyond The Grave

I am so grateful to The Eternal Portal for the idea of setting up email to one’s loved ones (and others) to be delivered after one’s death. However, I have been wondering about some of the legal and practical details.

Can one now receive spam from dead people? Is this potentially a new and aggressive form of haunting? If there is an afterlife, imagine that you have lined up a variety of unpleasant messages, and then, with the wisdom of the passed-on, have second thoughts and want to delete them after all. Alternatively, as the recipient, how could one sue a dead sender if their messages contained inflammatory or derogatory material?

One further thought. What if all this has already happened? We already receive many emails from imaginary people, but what if we are also receiving them from real, but dead, people?

The answer might be my new form of anti-spam software which I shall call “Dead Letter Box”. This will check (via Aristotle or perhaps the Mormons) whether the person sending the mail is still alive and if not would issue a ‘haunting alert’ whilst diverting the mail into a secure crypt from which it could be exhumed at the recipient’s convenience. Meanwhile the software would search death notices, probate records and so forth to identify the deceased sender’s next of kin and establish their creditworthiness.

Thank you all for your good wishes, especially Ruth, the Last Witch of Welney’s great, great, great granddaughter. I’ve also had a nice ‘wish you were here’ ePostcard from Syd Barrett, a long tale from Lord Monboddo and a rather terse note from Kenneth Lay :-)

The amusing software pictured comes from Spilsbury who also have a wide range of jokes and presents which might tickle your fancy.