There are a few options for when email accounts are deleted- feel free to let me know which you’d like:
We delete the email fully. Emails in the users inbox go away, and people emailing this address later get a “no such user” error. (not recommended). We don’t often recommend this option, but it is an option.
We delete the user, but make the email a forwarding address- this removes all emails that were in the current inbox, but makes any future emails to that address go to whatever current staffer is taking over that role. So the perk is future emails to the address are seen by whoever you assign them to, the downside is that former emails no longer exist.
We turn the user into a shared mailbox. This retains all former emails of that user, but then turns it into a shared mailbox that can be accessed by other users. In this case, emails sent in the future to this address will go into that shared mailbox, so it’s best practice to set an autoreply that you like, so that anyone emailing in the future gets the notification of who they should contact instead. If you ever need to get into the shared mailbox to retrieve a former staffers email, we would help you do that.
All three of these are cost you nothing and don’t need any license. The only downside of the shared mailbox option is that the emails retained in that box count against the 50 or 100 gig limit of whatever user then “owns” that shared mailbox. So after a long enough time of that person being gone, we then recommend having us remove even the shared mailbox (depending on company size, usually after 1-2 years if more than enough).
Thoughts? Whichever you like, we’ll do that. 🙂 And if you write a little auto-reply, we’ll use whatever you send each time. Otherwise, the default reply from MS365 when it’s been turned into a shared mailbox is:
“Thank you for contacting ‎”Company Name”‎. We regret to inform you that “Staffer Name” is no longer employed here. Please direct any future correspondence to ‎”Whatever staff you tell me to give their email to”‎ at “That staffers email address”‎.
This is an automated reply. “
Hope all this helps, feel free to call with any questions if you have them- I live to serve :)Explaining to clients account deletion options