Handle departures deliberately, or mail goes missing quietly.
THE SEQUENCE
- Change the mailbox password immediately, so the former employee cannot continue reading mail.
- Archive the contents if you need them. Connect the mailbox in Outlook or Thunderbird and export, or use webmail to download anything important.
- Decide whether the address should keep receiving mail. Customers and suppliers will keep using it for months.
- If it should, delete the mailbox and create a forwarder with the same address pointing at a colleague. That keeps mail flowing and frees the storage.
- If it should not, delete the mailbox and let mail bounce, which tells senders to stop using it.
WHAT ELSE TO CHECK
Any website form, invoice template or automated system configured to send from or to that address
Any third-party service registered with it: analytics, payment gateway, domain registrar
Mail rules or forwarders that person created
Passing the address on is easy. Discovering six months later that your payment gateway was registered to a mailbox you deleted is not.
