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January 10, 2007, 03:25 PM ET
The Ultimate Out-of-Office Reply
Have an important e-mail message to send but don’t want to be alive when the person receives it? Then this is for you.
A professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, has started an Internet service that allows users to send e-mail messages from beyond the grave. For $19.95 per year, according to United Press International, a customer can reserve e-mail messages to be delivered only after his or her time has passed.
Some people plan to send important stuff, such as computer passwords or locations of safety-deposit-box keys. Others may prepare that final farewell, so it will arrive in the in boxes of loved ones days after the sender’s death.
The service, called Deathswitch, works by automatically sending a message to the customer, usually every two weeks, just checking to see if that person is still alive. If no answer is received, the service goes into “worry mode” and starts pestering the person some more. Eventually the customer is declared dead, and the e-mails announcing such are sent.
To prevent a premature declaration of one’s demise, users can choose a vacation mode if they plan to be away from the Internet for an extended period of time. —Dan Carnevale
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