Tag: e-mail

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Employee leaving? What should you do about their email account?

email iconI highly recommend that if an employee leaves the company that you do NOT immediately delete their email account.

You should:
• change out the password
• consider backing up / archiving their email and contacts.
• set an “out of office” type message at the server level to tell people who they should now contact at your company.

Sample wording for an automated response message:

“Sue has moved on to another company and we wish her luck! Your new sales representative is Bob and he can be contacted at: bobsemail@companyname.com & 888-000-0000 ext 123 – We know you’re used to Sue so if needed, Bob would be happy to set up a meeting to get up to speed with your orders or simply get to know you better.”

Another thing to consider is being more proactive by immediately following up with all known contacts to let them know of this change. This may not catch everyone which is why I would still recommend the “out of office” type automated response message.

You should also consider leaving the old employee’s email account active for several months to a little over a year. Some things to consider when deciding how long to keep that email account active / an automated response active:
• how long they worked at the company.
• how important the employee’s contact’s might have been.
• how often people might regularly be in touch is another factor (annual order vs monthly order.)

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I can’t say these two things enough…

 

  1. BE SMART WITH YOUR PASSWORDS:
    1. Use a strong password for your email. Use a strong password for other accounts too but I want to emphasize email because people seem to forget that your email account can be used to reset other passwords AND contact everyone in your contacts list.
    2. Use different passwords for different accounts: “If you have ever used the same password in more than one place, you have reduced your overall safety record to whichever site had the lowest amount of protection.”
    3. and if you need to store a lot of passwords, use an encrypted database like lastpass.com, 1password or keepass. These password databases can also help you generate more secure passwords that utilize random letters, numbers, caps, and symbols.
  2. BACKUP YOUR DATA no matter where it’s located: computer, cloud, hosting. E-mail, contacts, even social networking data if it’s important to you. Back it up. There are different backup solutions but without going into specifics, think about external hard drives AND off-site storage.
The reason I bring these things is that having a secure password can help prevent your accounts from getting hacked. Or save your business by having backups if you do get hacked or have a computer system fail.