Thunderheart has annouced that SOE will be performing a character purge in mid-October. Basically if you have any accounts that have been canceled for more than six months those acccounts will be deleted from SOE's servers. The official post follows:

In mid-October, we will be doing a “character purge” of the system. This will be the big deletion of stale characters and items and it will affect all Galaxies. What this means is that any account that has been cancelled for longer than 6 months will be deleted from the database. Character names, items, lots and everything the character possessed will be permanently deleted. The Character Purge is being done to free up names and game space for incoming and existing players. After the mid-October purge, we will be performing a character once every month. We will announce all purges at least a week prior. Kurt "Thunderheart" Stangl Community Relations Manager