Why we expire email accounts.

TFN offers an email address, free of charge, for life, to each of our voting members.  Though we don't charge for the basic service, we do incur costs to provide it.  We incur them gladly, for people who want and use our email service.  Alas, because the service is free of charge, some people act thoughtlessly, wasting TFN resources.  This benefits no one.  So, we try to detect and limit waste.

How to keep your email account from expiring.

You must periodically reaffirm your desire for a TFN email address.

If you pick up your mail at TFN:

The act of reading your mail suffices — our systems know when you've picked it up, and that's proof enough for us.

If you forward your TFN mail to another site:

Since your mail isn't stored on TFN's servers, our systems can't tell whether it is getting read.  So we ask you to log in to your TFN account, and reaffirm your forwarding address, to keep it active.

Expiry deadline.

To keep your email account active, you must check your TFN mailbox (or reaffirm your forwarding address) at least every 366 days (1 year, including possible leap day).

When your account reaches 1 year of inactivity, we stop accepting mail sent to your address.  We call that an "expired email account".  The address remains registered to you, but all mail sent to it bounces.  As the expiry date approaches, we try to send you reminders but we don't always succeed.  Ultimately, you alone are responsible for keeping your account active.

Ensure your mailbox doesn't fill up.

To receive mail, your mailbox must have room to store the incoming message.  Obviously, this applies only if you store your mail at TFN.  It doesn't apply when you forward your mail off site without keeping a copy at TFN.

If your mailbox fills up, we expire your email account, and stop accepting mail sent to you.  To ensure this doesn't happen, you must either delete your messages or download them to your computer, periodically.

Reactivate after expiry.

To reactivate an expired email account, just log in and read your accumulated mail (or reaffirm your forwarding address).  If the reason for the expiry was that your mailbox filled up, then you must delete some messages or download them.  Your account will then get reactivated by the automatic checks.  They run each night, between midnight and 8 am.

If you've been absent for many years, we may have moved your account offline.  We call that a "dormant account".  When we do that, your password stops working, so you can't log in to reactivate your mail.  Instead, you must talk to us.  Either visit the office or phone us.  If you get our answering machine, just leave a message.  We'll call you back.  We're friendly that way!