I know the admins have the stand that they won't delete accounts.

And personally, I agree with that. There are players who spend real money on this game, and have to leave because of real life circumstances. It would be quite upsetting for them if they lost everything. And I have returned to games I played previously after hiatus for over a year, so I'll like my account to remain.

@Catalina323

In response to your post at 12:12 this afternoon, that is allowed. As stated in the Terms of Service, "Sharing accounts or personal information is not advised. If sharing an account, you are hereby warned that any harm done to your account is not the responsibility or liability of the Site or its Staff."

Hmm...
What about sending them an email after them not being active for 2 years that says that their account might be deleted?

I'm all for sending email reminders to inactive players, though I personally wouldn't like the "might delete account" part. But an admin has said that they used to send emails, and they tend to be marked as spam, and their email being blacklisted, so it was too much trouble.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=33919&page=1#7 Author: Krinadon Time Posted: 4/4/2016 at 3:30 AM We used to send out emails as newsletters and announcements and it was met with awful performance. Not only is it quite a feat to mass email thousands (now, tens of thousands) of people, but what ended up happening is X% marked it as spam and after a few newsletters, all of the major providers were just bouncing it back because we had been blacklisted. Even now, just sending emails for registration, activation, and receipts, we have to constantly deal with providers blacklisting and blocking us... (looking at you, AT&T) That, coupled with the fact that less than 1% actually viewed and followed through with the announcements made us just scrap the whole system. Personally, I don't think emails are really valuable any longer outside of just wanted communication (receipts, forgot passwords, etc). I just instantly delete / unsubscribe / mark as spam like 98% of newsletters/announcements that I receive even from stuff that I'm interested in or sites that I frequent. And like I said, with providers now a days and how bad spam is, it's REALLY easy to end up on the blacklist. That is also an additional issue. In order to avoid having our support email and noreply email blacklisted, we would have to send out announcement emails from a third party provider (or use a 2nd server of our own). It's actually quite expensive to use these and they are usually quite strict with what you can and can't do with them because they don't want their IPs blacklisted lol. It just was too much of a headache all around, unfortunately.

Since you're quite interested in this topic, I did a little digging, and will link a few relevant threads:

https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=40898
-Someone suggested a way to reduce the amount of inactive users that tend to show up in random searches, admin said they will be restructuring how the accounts and database works. Not sure if this will affect usage of usernames.

https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=33919
-Sending of emails to inactive players to remind them about the game.

https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=33920
https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=19929
-Previous suggestions to deactivate/delete inactive accounts.
-Admin's response:

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=19929&page=2#16 Author: Krinadon Time Posted: 12/10/2014 at 5:31 PM We would never do something like this. Personally, I haven't played Everquest in probably 4 years. But I would cry a river if I logged in and a message popped up saying, "Sorry, your account has been deleted due to inactivity." I have so much invested into my character and the account as a whole. So I'm sure many others would feel the same way about their Sylestia account. Additionally, it's not that taxing to keep records - especially of players. We have well over a million pets now and conversely, under 30,000 players. If we were to remove everyone's account who hasn't logged in in the past 6 months, the server wouldn't even be able to notice. So there's really no positive to doing something like this, but lots of negatives. Sylestia will always be here for those who want to come back. This includes their account and their companions. =)

Generally, this topic is a little controversial. Some players leave, and may or may not come back. They may have items/pets in their account that is valuable/wanted, but other players can't have access to them. What to do with those accounts/items/pets can be sensitive to some players, especially those that spend a lot of effort, or real money, to build their accounts to where they are now. Also, there would be gaps in the user IDs. I've also heard concerns regarding usernames, where if a previously high-profile player leave, and their account gets deleted, and another new player comes in and takes that username, there can be misunderstandings in the community who knew the previous player that arises from that.