Our SBCglobal email accounts disappeared without notification - WHY?

My husband and I had a SBCGLOBAL phone and internet account in 2005-2006. When we moved out of that phone service we kept our @sbcglobal email accounts. It was my husband's primary email account where he received a lot of email that involved his work. Both of us received a lot of mail at our two individual sbcglobal email accounts. Suddenly, without any notification from ATT, our passwords no longer worked. Trying to deal with ATT by phone was impossible. The people we tried to get information from were vague and unhelpfull. It was impossible for us to remember all of the people who wrote to us via our sbcglaobal accounts. There was absolutely no way to change the email address so we did not miss any mail. No one at ATT appeared to care and offered us no assistance. Why weren't we notified about this before it happened? Why weren't we offered an easy way to transfer our accounts to the new email service from ATT Yahoo? Why was this not handled in a professional manner? Instead we lost everything - all of our mail, our mail folders, everything and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. My husband still has problems as he lost very important work related communications he has no way of getting back due to ATT's dishonest way of dealing with this issue that involved private and personal communications that belonged to us not to ATT or Yahoo Can anyone explain to me why this happened? Is there anything we can do to get our mail back after so much time? This could be construed as a criminal act by ATT. They had no right to terminate out accounts without letting us know what they were intending to do causing us to lose mail that was important to us to receive. What happened to all of it?