Life keeps us so busy writing emails that most of us haven’t considered what happens to our electronic communications when we’re dead. Can they be accessed by your family, or by a representative you designated in life? What if you leave no will and people need to know what you wanted done with your stuff?

On Monday (Oct. 16), a Massachusetts appeals court ruled in Yahoo v. Ajemian (pdf) that even if permission wasn’t expressly granted, legal representatives of a deceased email-account holder can access messages in order to discern his or her intent for the estate.

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Albert Gidari, director of privacy for Stanford University Law School’s Center for Internet and Society in California, thoroughly disagrees with his colleagues on the east coast. He told Quartz (in an email, of course) that the Massachusetts decision was “nonsense” and that this question didn’t even really need resolving.

“This issue has been around since the dawn of email,” wrote Gidari. Email service providers have different policies and procedures, but all follow federal law, which prohibits the disclosure of the content of communications to anyone without user consent. Absent the clearly expressed wishes of a deceased user in a will, an account will be abandoned and should ultimately be deleted, he argues.

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In Gidari’s view, the Massachusetts decision contradicts the vast majority of state law decisions and probably the wishes of the deceased. He says the issue isn’t just Ajemian’s privacy, but that of all of those with whom he communicated. “He chose in life not to share that information, and didn’t take advantage of the tools Yahoo provides to allow users to export their data and store it offline,” Gidari says. “Access to content is just gratuitous and unnecessary to fulfill the estate.”

Gidari has been working on this issue for 20 years, and points out that grieving family members are often unpleasantly surprised by their findings. They read emails seeking solace, but, he says, “in my experience, the opposite happens—users discuss personal matters like their sexual orientation or that of their other family members, maybe drug use, true feelings about another family member or friend, an indiscretion shared with a close confidante, etc. Those communications were never meant to be seen by…a personal representative.”