Best practices for disabling email accounts

[John Capo]

Quoting Blake Swensen (blake at pyramus.com):
> Many of you are in the same boat, where customers fall behind and 
> collections letters still do not seem to grab their attention.
> 
> Short of changing passwords, does anyone have a best practices method of 
> temporarily preventing access to email boxes temporarily. In most of 
> these cases, once the customer has paid, I would like to turn back on 
> the email boxes.
> 

Reject incoming email but allow access to the mailbox so that your
customer can retrieve mail you have already accepted.  Rejecting
further email notifies the senders that the email was not delivered
and they can contact your customer by other means.

A recent court case ruled in favor of a plaintiff that claimed they
were denied access to important email and lost a large contract
because email was accepted but not delivered to the plaintiff.  I
think it was a Canadian case but with the legal climate in most
countries today why take a chance.

IANAL, but I do host mail for a number of legal firms.

-- 
John Capo
Tuffmail.com