Why is so hard to retreive?
An email address through an email "provider" -- such as Yahoo, hotmail, gmail, etc, can pretty much always be accessed anywhere, at any time, and you never lose access to these.
A "custom" email -- like, for example, my business email,
[email protected], where the email depends on my domain name (14thstreetgeckos.com), usually vanishes with EITHER the domain registration, or the hosting, depending on how you set it up. It's kind of a weird mess. Some registrars host email, some you have to have your host do.
In my example, godaddy.com is my registrar, I paid them to buy my domain name; but slicehost.com is our web host, they store our content and provide our bandwidth. If Dean's webhost has his email, he's probably lost all access to it and it's essentially "gone". If his registrar manages it, he should still be able to get at it.
Now, you CAN set it up so that an email provider actually manages the email account as yet a third component. gmail.com actually manages webmaster@14thstreetgeckos, neither godaddy or slicehost do it. So even if I stopped paying for hosting today, I'd have access to that email address until my domain expires. However, when the domain expires, the email address vanishes along with it.
A basic email address is a useful thing to have for reasons like this; but, if Dean did have his email set up to his custom domain name, and can no longer access that email, the "forget password" link is useless to him, as the password reminder or reset goes to that email address.
