Sunday, March 22, 2009

Send Emails AFTER Your Death!

The following wastaken from the 21 March 2009 EOGN:

"
This sounds morbid, but do you have a method of passing on important information to others in the case of your death? David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has had plenty of time to think about the issue.

"I work in the world's largest medical center, and what you see here every day is people showing up in ambulances who didn't expect that just five minutes earlier," he said. "If you suddenly die or go into a coma, there can be a lot of things that are only in your head in terms of where things are stored, where your passwords are."

He set up a site called Deathswitch, where people can set up e-mails that will be sent out automatically if they don't check in at intervals they specify, like once a week.

Why would you want to do such a thing? The company's web site points out a variety of potential reasons, like not leaving your coworkers and family high and dry without important passwords or information and getting a secret off your chest now that you're gone. I might send a message to the boss, telling him what I really think of him.

You might call it "information insurance."

The basic service is free and includes a single email. The pay service, $20 a year, allows you to compose up to 30 emails with 10 recipients each. Only the pay service allows you to include attachments. Death Switch determines when to send out the messages by sending out messages to you on a regular basis. If you fail to respond to enough of those messages in a row, the emails are mailed out.

You can see the service for yourself at http://www.DeathSwitch.com. "

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