An employee is leaving: protect their mailbox before it gets emptied
An employee who leaves on bad terms may still have access to their mailbox for a few days. If they delete emails, your provider’s redundancy and trash will not bring them back months later.
Take an example. A salesperson leaves the company, and it does not end well. Their account stays open for a few days so that ongoing deals can be handed over. On the Friday, they clear out the mailbox: old quotes, the emails about a late delivery, and the thread where they agreed a discount by email that never made it into the contract.
Nobody notices. Three months later, a customer disputes an invoice and points to that discount. The thread is no longer on the server or in the trash, and the mailbox was closed in the meantime. The customer still has their copy.
Why your provider cannot help
Each of those deletions was legitimate: a valid account, in its own mailbox, using an ordinary mail app. No alert goes off, because nothing unusual happened. Replication copies the deletions, the trash empties after the usual delay, and the account is closed as part of the normal offboarding process.
Your provider’s safeguards are designed for hardware failures and accidents. They do nothing when the account holder deletes their own email on purpose.
Deletions made by a legitimate user do not trigger any alert at your provider. The only way to recover them is a copy made beforehand.
Recovery windows are too short
People rarely find out the same week. Disputes come up at invoicing, at year end, when a customer stops paying or when a lawyer asks for a specific exchange. That is often several months later, sometimes more than a year.
Provider recovery windows are counted in days: usually around thirty in the trash, and on Google Workspace an administrator gets another 25 days to restore. By the time the question comes up, those windows have long closed.
- Back up the mailbox before the departure is announced.
- Keep the backup after the account is closed. You may need those emails as evidence long after the employment contract has ended.
- Check that you can retrieve a single message without reopening the account.
What a backup changes
A message deleted from the server stays in the istorel backup, flagged as deleted on the server. You can find it by sender, subject or date, and download it as an .eml file, a standard format any mail app can open. The headers are kept as they were. In a dispute, they show who sent the message and when.
So you can close the account on the planned date, and the company keeps the history of its exchanges.
Backups and employee privacy
Backing up a mailbox is not the same as monitoring an employee. The aim is to keep the company’s records. In France and across the EU, employees must be told that their mailboxes are backed up, retention has to be proportionate, and only people who need access should have it.
Following these rules also protects the company: a court may refuse to take into account a copy kept without telling employees.