Proper way to deal with email of former employees

[Velvis]

I have a client that is fairly insistent on keeping an email alive and having the new person continue to check the old email. But after a month or so the new employee stops or forgets to check. I tried setting up a noreply@ address with a generic please contact the main telephone number. Then setting up aliases of the former employees to go-to noreply.

However the noreply gets flagged for spamming (because so many auto replies are going out.)

What's the best method for dealing with this type of situation? They just moved from hosted exchange to o365 if that makes available a solution.




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[britechguy]

If it were me, I'd set that now-defunct employee's email address to send out an automated response identifying the person in the organization that should be contacted going forward for business they used to attend to, then also forward the incoming message to the person noted behind the scenes. That would go on for, say, 30 days (the length of time really depends on what the client wants). I also include something in that message to the effect of, "Person X has left his/her position at EntityY, and that PersonZ, at address {insert email address here}, is the new point of contact."

After the behind the scenes forwarding period, I would set up an automatic response for the e-mail address in question using something like vacation responder that send out a message, once per any given person in the now-defunct employee's contacts, giving the contact information for the person who's taken over. Period of time again dictated by business need.

After that, the address gets nuked. There comes a point where all those who should have been notified almost certainly have been, and you don't keep around any given e-mail address for someone who no longer works there forever.

 

[trevm999]

What I'd normally do is if the mailbox is less than 50GB, convert to a shared mailbox, forward to new user and give someone access to the mailbox and free up the licence.

Then they can advise me what they want done with the emails in the mailbox. Either I can export and import to someone else's mailbox or just export and save the pst somewhere for retention. Then I set up and alias for its email address for the person who was getting forwarded to and delete the mailbox.

 

[Moltuae]

What I'd normally do is if the mailbox is less than 50GB, convert to a shared mailbox, forward to new user and give someone access to the mailbox and free up the licence.

This is what I usually do too (convert to a shared mailbox), except I'll then just share the mailbox with whoever needs access to it (no forwarders). Additionally, I usually add (or recommend that they add) the inbox for the shared mailbox to their Outlook favourites so that they can clearly see when the mailbox has unread mail. One thing to bear in mind is that shared mailboxes do not automatically appear in the Outlook mobile app (though it is possible to manually add them I believe) so this approach is probably best suited to an office/desktop environment.

 

[Markverhyden]

I'll take the mailstore in question and create a shared mbox. As far as the old address is concerned. I always recommend to my customers that they create a generic email address, eg info@, admin@ etc. I'll then use that as a catch all for undeliverable addresses. The old email address itself may vary. For instance if the new employee is replacing the old employee I'll add the old employee's address as an alias. Either way there'll be an auto responder rule for the old address notifying the sender of the change.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Convert to shared mailbox....and give someone (replacement and/or management) rights to view that mailbox. Some people like additionally adding a forwarding rule, usually just being able to view/peruse the mailbox is adequate.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Yep, shared mailbox, and forward on request for me as well.