Most connected lives contain a small number of accounts that the principal no longer uses but has not closed. An email address from a previous job. A web service account set up for a single purpose ten years ago. A directory listing entered when a particular industry required it. The principal moved on; the accounts did not.

The accounts continue to receive what they were configured to receive. Newsletters arrive; notifications continue; verification messages from services the principal had forgotten the existence of land in inboxes the principal no longer reads. The world has continued to send mail to the account on the basis that it is the principal's current address. The principal has continued not to read it.

The mail that arrives is, in many cases, more revealing than the principal would consider acceptable in their current correspondence. It includes notifications from services they have used since, references to people they know now, statements from accounts that share information with their current life. Anyone who gained access to the old account would, in effect, gain access to a parallel summary of the present one.

Access to the old accounts is, in many cases, easier than access to the current ones. The protections on the old account were appropriate for the time it was set up, not for the present moment; the credentials have, in many cases, appeared in subsequent leaks; the recovery routes pass through identifiers that the principal has long forgotten and that an outsider can sometimes reconstruct.

The work in this category is administrative and undramatic. It begins with the audit of which old accounts remain open, in what state, receiving what. It continues with the considered closing of the accounts that are no longer needed, the migration of the few that still have a function to current addresses with current protections, and the deliberate emptying of the accounts that are kept for archival reasons so that they no longer hold material that ought not to be reached.