Email? What email?

Imagine this story if you will. You go away for a few weeks to visit family or tour Europe or hike the Himalayas and you check in to your Email account from some internet café only to discover that your email account is no longer functioning. You try a few more times while on the road, to no avail.

Once you arrive home, you inadvertently discover that your email account has been deactivated by your email provider. Why? Because a judge ordered them to. Why? Because a bank sued your email provider, forcing them to put a restraining order on your account. Why on earth would they do that? Because a bank asked your email provider to divulge who owns your account - and they refused. Whoa. Wait. What? Why is a bank demanding to know who you are? Because someone at the bank sent confidential personal information about 1300 bank customers to your email address by mistake. After failing to make contact with you to get assurances that you didn't open and then destroyed the message and its attached files, they freaked out.

Sounds like you've been written into an episode of Law & Order? Too bad, because it happened in real life.

Let's review shall we? A bank makes a mistake. Your email account is deactivated. You didn't really need your email that badly, right? No, I didn't think so....... This sets an extremely dangerous precedent.

[Update] A court has granted a joint motion to dismiss the suit against Google. It appears that the message was never opened; it has been deleted (by Google) and the Gmail account has been reactivated. No word from the owner of the account.