This guide offers general advice on what to do with email accounts that are no longer used. For example, if you have setup a personal email address for an employee who has now left your company, you maybe wondering what the best-practice is for dealing with emails send to that address. How do you make sure you do not miss out on that important email address?

The following steps are intended to offer some general tips for managing old and unused email accounts.

1. The day your employee leaves, we recommend immediately changing the mailbox password. Changing the password will lock-out the old user from the mailbox.
2. Check if you need to change your SMTP settings. If your employee was using your Ecenica SMTP service to send email, check if you also need to change your SMTP password. This will make sure they can’t send email using your Ecenica service.
3. Pass the new details on to the person taking over the ex-employees duties.
4. After say 3 months, disable and then remove the account from your Ecenica Hosting email server.

Why delete old email addresses and unused mailboxes?

The steps above allow you time to address any important emails coming into the redundant mailbox and you do not leave a trial of unattended mailboxes – which is a security risk. You’ll also save time not having to update old mailbox passwords.

Can I redirect the old email address?

Ecenica Hosting email server also allow you to setup email forwarders which allow you to redirect email to another email address. Forwarding email offer the advantage of not having to login to multiple mailboxes to check email which can save time. However if you prefer to keep incoming emails separate this might not be the best option for you.

What about email backups?

If you have your own internal email retention policy deleting the mailbox after a set time period will minimise the need to take backups. instead you can just hold backups of the point the employee left.

What happens to emails sent to the old email address?

If someone emails the old email address after you;ve removed the email mailbox, our servers will send them a “bounce-back” message explaining to them why the email could not be delivered.

Normally at this point they’ll attempt to find an alternative mailbox.

If you have any questions about email hosting or email backups please feel free to get in touch.

External links

Email Retention Policy for terminated employees

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• Backup Policy
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• How to test your email address

Tags: address, backups, Email, retention, unused

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2012 at 11:01 am and is filed under Email. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.