Office 365 gives you some helpful options to manage email accounts when a staff member leaves.

It is often necessary to be able to access the outgoing employee’s email archive and to make sure that anything sent to them in future will reach an inbox you can access. Here we’ll explain the difference between archiving and deleting an account in Office 365 and which would be most appropriate in different scenarios.

 Archiving

Let’s say for example, Dave Stevens has left your company, but you still need access to Dave’s inbox so you can read previously sent/received emails and see anything sent to his email address by contacts who may not know that Dave has left the business.

We would archive that mailbox and convert it to a shared mailbox so that you could read previously sent emails and would still receive mail addressed to Dave, but you would not be able to send anything from his email address.

Deletion

When an employee has left and you have no further use for the account, you can delete it entirely. This is a permanent change; you will not be able to regain access to the account. Make sure you are absolutely sure that you want to do this before requesting a deletion, and that you have saved any data from the account that you may need in the future.

If someone were to send an email to this account it would be returned as undeliverable.

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