Leaving job, work email registered on everything

Our work have allowed some people to port their work phone numbers without issue.

Gosh you do realise your employers have access to your work email? I can’t imagine using it for personal stuff!
There’s no ‘list’, as what I attach my email too will be very different to yours, bar things like Amazon.

Yes, but they need to be willing to transfer via a PAC code that they request. The switch was then relatively simple.

Oh yes we get the fake emails as well! so you click on it and it says “you should not have clicked on this because it’s a dodgy email but don’t tell your colleagues”. I usually look at the email headers if I’m not sure and see who actually sent it and when I looked them up they were a well known cyber firm who specialise in that sort of thing as a solution for companies for cyber security awareness.

Oh, don't worry I still have 4 letter @MSN email from 1995.

If you do not own your own domain (the bit after the "@") then you are at the mercy of whoever does.

I got my own myname.com domain not long after I bagged [email protected]

(That neither of them needs any numbers is a subtle sign of how long I have owned them 😀)

And that's fine for you. But it doesn't change the actual fact that 15 years ago 1 in 4 people didn't have access to the Internet in the UK in their home and as a consequence used work facilities or their local library or Internet cafe and 25 years ago it was 45 percent of people. So it's perfectly understandable how these situations have developed.

I have never used my work email for my own stuff, but 2 years ago I switched from PlusNet to BT for my ISP.
I had been with PlusNet since 2003 and had to do a quick shuffle of a few accounts to my Gmail account, made easier that I use Firefox for all internet related stuff and the saved password section saved a lot of time finding the ones still linked to PlusNet.
2022 I was made redundant after 31 years (Site closed) and the joy of giving up that work mobile No (3 week on call rotation) was the best thing ever.

I too am surprised people do this.
I have never used work email or work phone for anything other than work.
There is absolutely no way it would be allowed where I currently work or in any previous places I’ve worked.
I would not need my work phone or number if I don’t work there so would have no need to keep it.

I prefer having two phones. I like to be able to ignore my work phone when I'm on leave or on holiday etc.

But each to their own.

It does seem a bit strange that your work and personal life are so enmeshed, to the point that you don't even have a personal phone!

The novelty of having to carry 2 phones can wear off pretty quickly.

In my last role, I bought a set of VOIP numbers (3cx) and assigned them to staff and linked them to an app and piped the VOIP number to their app so a call to the work number could be answered (via the app) on a personal phone. When they left, just de-pipe the number and they can do what they want with the app.

Again, if you know, you know.

yes I and my colleagues had personal mobile phones before we were given work phones. and this was some 20 years ago

A grown up 2FA mechanism will allow backup codes to be generated for offline use.

I have done this in my last few roles (IT managering) and given them to the CEO to be kept in an offsite fire safe (but he also took a picture of them on his phone).

I also screenshotted the QR code used to seed the authenticator (Google) so that another device could be used for 2FA. These too were kept in a safe (and I kept a local copy too).

All the issues being wailed about here are completely surmountable if you are paying the right people the right money to do the right job. And (as a colleague one said rather colourfully tough titties if you don't.

It does seem a bit strange that your work and personal life are so enmeshed, to the point that you don't even have a personal phone!

But I agree with what others have said. Start with banking, savings, pensions, insurances and HMRC. Any professional organisations or resources you use for work that you might wish to continue with? Then home utilities.
Then move on to monthly subscriptions, and then the shopping sites. But frankly, they'd be very easy to set up new accounts for with a new email address anyway.

Basically, anything that would be a massive ballache to sort after the fact, do first. Anything that involves money.

Quoting my earlier post to add to it: the most insurmountable thing that was a feature of every account that had been started up by another person (a predecessor) was 2-factor authentication, where an automated checker with a lifespan of 10 mins or so will be sent to a mobile or to an email address. Even when, technically, the administrator role had been transferred. If your work email address is erased, this will send you to the brink of insanity because only half of any verification process will be possible, and mostly, a person you may be able to get through to (if it's not a chatbot) will not be able to influence it in any way.

Well it doesn't really sell the UK as a high tech workforce, certainly.

No, it’s not her log in at all, she put it down as her correspondence email initially,,since changed after I found out,I made her change how she logs in, she uses fingerprint/facial recognition and cannot use those on her work computer,it’s definitely not her log in. I actively discourage her from accessing any financial stuff on any work IT equipment I’d agree that too many people are too naive about internet security.

Just change everything to a new account while you still have access

My company wouldn't either. We have an IT team who are shit hot on this kind of thing. We are always having to do online courses about IT security.

They even send us fake spam emails to make sure we are in the ball and can spot them and report them as phishing emails.

I work in a heavily regulated sector and I’d still say it’s pretty normal to have a conversation about keeping at least your number if not your handset too. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask if you can or what their policy is on it.

Very much so, I think people may think that because a new email in their inbox is “unread” no one else has seen it or it would change to “read” when that only applies to the version of it they are seeing and the email exists elsewhere on the mail server etc. Or they think because the email is their name then it’s “personal” and can only been viewed by them.

My company just wouldn’t allow it…it would be misuse of company email / internet policies.

The naivety on this thread is worrying, isn't it.

Do you mean your DW uses her work email address as the login for banking? If so, this should be changed as the emails can be read and intercepted by anyone with access in IT or anyone the company has outsourced that access to eg. 3rd party support services. You would have no way of knowing that these emails have been accessed. I have access to thousands of work mailboxes in my IT job. The passwords could easily be changed and your DW would be locked out of the account. If any fraud were to occur then you may not be covered as it’s not a “personal” email account that only you have access to, which is not advised.

Many many years ago a very techy “friend” of mine said to me they would host my email domain which was my then surname so my emails were for example [email protected] I didn’t give it much thought and it was free rather than paying hosting charges. My emails came into my mailbox as unread like normal. It was only years later when I became an IT professional myself I realised they had the ability to read every single email I sent and received on their own computers and I had no idea (made sense how they knew personal things about me at the time though).

Just to clarify, DW uses her work email address, she doesn’t actually access her bank details etc at work, just don’t know why she hasn’t set up one of her own, despite being told by me and her DS about internet security( he worked for a very IT conscious large accountancy firm)

I’m in the same position with a lot of my online accounts registered to my work email. As my job could go at any time I have recently started working through as I spot them and changing them to my personal email. It will take forever and I’m sure I’ll miss some but will get there in the end. Good luck