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3b The entire contents of the message.

4 A copy of the death certificate of the deceased.

5 A copy of the document that gives the requester power of attorney over the Gmail account.

6 If the requester is the parent of the individual, they should send a copy of the birth certificate if the Gmail account owner was under the age of 18. In this case, power of attorney isn't required.

So not only do you need to have been sent a message from your own husband or wife - which is by no means a foregone conclusion in a typical relationship where you talk to one another every day - you also need to have a document specifically awarding you power of attorney. In other words, the Gmail account had to be listed in the person's will.

To make matters worse, the request has to be sent in writing or faxed to Google's US offices. "We'll need 30 days to process and validate the documents you've provided", a Google spokesperson claims. Bang goes any chance of tracking down friends for the funeral at short notice.

Microsoft's Hotmail is marginally less demanding, requiring only a copy of the death certificate, a photocopy of your driving licence and proof that you're the legal benefactor to be faxed to the company's US headquarters before it will consider sending out the contents of the inbox on a CD-ROM.

Are the webmail providers right to be so protective of their former customers' email? After all, nobody would expect an

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email provider to allow a spouse to snoop in their partner's inbox while they're alive - why should that be any different after they die? That's certainly Yahoo's attitude. "The commitment Yahoo makes to every person who signs up for a Yahoo account is to treat their email as private and to treat the content of their accounts as confidential", a company spokesperson claimed. "With that in mind, we have a clause in our terms of service that addresses survivorship and non-transferability. That means a webmail account is non-transferable and any rights to its content terminate on the user's death."

Yet that policy fails to acknowledge the changing nature of communication. Today, the number of emails sent far outweighs the handwritten letter. Few people who found a box of letters under a dead relative's bed would throw them out without even a cursory glance. How many family secrets or touching personal memories have been unearthed in the correspondence of a deceased relative? Today's equivalent of that poignant letter your grandfather wrote to your grandmother from the frontline in World War II might well be an email sent from a bunker in Baghdad. Indeed, in 2005 a US court ordered Yahoo to hand over the email of US Marine Justin Ellsworth to his father, after the 20-year-old was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

Legal experts claim that a person's email account has the same legal standing as their house or their car. "With these things, you have to go back to first principle," says Richard Grosberg of Nelsons Solicitors. "The account is an asset of the person who's died. Legally, that person's assets pass to their executors. Therefore, the ISP would have to provide access to that account to the executors."

And what if there are secrets lurking in your inbox that you'd rather relatives didn't happen upon after you'd croaked it? "You could certainly leave instructions for the executors to say these [accounts] must be deleted," says Grosberg. Best of luck explaining that decision to your wife when you make your will.