Leaving job, work email registered on everything

Because it would extraordinarily unprofessional.

because its potentially their connection to a customer base and the customer base's connection to the company.

Doesn't that all very much depend on the employer and the role? I am thinking of a scenario where the phone is used to deal with external customers or suppliers.

OP takes her phone with her, a customer calls to ask about a product/service and OP says "Sorry, not with ABC Widgets any more but my new employer XYZ Widgets can help". Original company loses sale. Or customer phones the OP who says she's out of the widgets business entirely but she'd be happy to talk to them about her new artisan bakery. Customer is pissed off and now scrabbling around to make a second phone call. I can't see any advantage to the company at all of allowing the OP to take her number with her.

You know workplaces can see all your emails and activities? Not helpful now i know but there is literally no good reason to do this and is probably a breach of your employment contract. In terms of practicalities i have changed email a few times and it takes a while but it is not too bad. Do the really important ones first and keep a running list. Every time you get a non work email jot down the organisation on your list. You will get there eventually.

No HR Dept. I ever worked with would tolerate you doing this with your email for one second.

I was once involved (as the "prisoner's friend") at a disciplinary hearing for a guy who had used his work email in this exact same way. I'm not sure how you have got away with this. He got a formal written warning.

[Edited to try and remove quote which is n/a to my comment.]

Our company allows you to take your number if you want. It's a 5 minute job for an admin. Why would they care about owning a number?

Well, she would not be dead! It is merely an administrative inconvenience. Not actually the heights of stupidity that you are claiming. Think of the guy that decided to launch a bottle rocket from his anus. Now that was "incredibly stupid". The OP knows that she has made a mistake, no need to tell her she is the most stupid person on the planet.

I had similar years ago - except that it was a personal email address which wanted to start charging a monthly fee because we had switched broadband provider, not my work email. I did exactly as pp suggested, made a list of everything and just worked through them. I still had access to the inbox for a while which meant I could see stuff come in (but not reply to anything) and action anything I had missed. I also emailed everyone in my address book asking them to use my iCloud address, which I’d had for a while and didn’t use as my main contact until then.

It was a pain and annoying but all okay in the end. I didn’t have the phone side of it though which might complicate it more if you need authentication codes sent and so on, so I would try and get that sorted asap.

Our IT team would probably have picked this up years ago as we have very tight security and firewalls. Sites like Facebook are blocked anyway.

It sounds like the internet security where the OP works is very lax.

We have to do online internet security training at frequent intervals, and our IT department send spam emails now and again to test us.

Setting up your internet banking, shopping accounts and all social media to a work email is incredibly stupid, imagine if OP had of been fired at any point and access immediately revoked, then what?

I don’t believe OP has said what industry they work in but any employer who allows this sets themselves up for a major cybersecurity failure.

I am amazed that your employer allows this.

Why not ?

I'm gobsmacked that you thought that this was OK. It's very easy to create your own personal email address, so start today and update your personal details asap. Spend all day on it if you need to, and prioritise your bank and social media. All this could come to light when you leave when IT check over your laptop.

Using a work email address for social media accounts is a disciplinary offence where I work.

We don't have work mobiles as we have software on our laptops to make phone calls.

But doesn't this mean you have your bank (and every one company from Nectar to your water bill...) sending personal emails with personal stuff to your work email account...that your work may have access to after you leave? You need to scrub anything personal, IE all history of personal stuff, from your work email account too.

This is specifically forbidden where I work and many popular internet sites are blocked so we can't access them from our work computers anyway ( Amazon, FB, ebay, banks).
Tbh I am surprised this has gone unnoticed for so long. I have access to all 15 of my team's inboxes when they are out of office so I can check for important incoming email traffic. And IT can obviously access too so personal use would be picked up pretty quickly.
Not to mention the sheer volume. I get 60-80 work emails per day. If you added private stuff to the mix I would spend all day just managing my inbox !
Plus it must be a huge security issue due to all the recent breaches. When M&S and LNER were hacked recently I noticed a real increase in spam from overseas in my personal inbox. Would have been a real issue if that had all come to my work email address.

I agree with that. My workwould absolutely not be happy with this. Lots of websites have data breaches and if you also use passwords interchangeably it's quite a risk. Plus I bet you there is somewhere written you shouldn't do that.
Quietly change everything asap

On a scale of - tying helium balloons to a deck chair and floating off over an ocean - using the wrong email address, it doesn't seem that daft? Or the person who wanted to live with bears? Spoiler, the bears had other plans...

On your laptop, if you open your browser and go to settings, you can view what sites have saved passwords and what the username/password is. If yours is like mine there will be loads of sites, that I've had to register for to make a purchase (and so they can bombard me with spam) and will never need again, if you do just re-register with your new address.

Quite possibly one of the dumbest things anyone has ever done but also easily fixable thankfully.

You just need to go through every account and change the contact details.

When you set up your new email account set up several - have one for the most important financial stuff - one for utilities - one for health stuff - one for shopping - and a junk one for when you have to give an email but don’t want to get emails.

(you can just use Apples - hide me email feature too)

You can do this all in one umbrella account as different aliases or as separate actual accounts.

sorry if this has already been mentioned

Yes I did this after I left a job, it was actually really easy to do they just gave me a code and it was really simple and no hassle at all.

OP - It’s really important that you setup a personal email like gmail etc. Your work email is not personal it can be easily accessed by numerous IT staff at your place of work or any IT staff they outsource IT support / email administration to. Passwords and links can be intercepted and you would not be covered if any fraud took place as other people have access to your emails. For example if you received a “magic link” for banking to log in. Move everything over, delete the personal emails and unsubscribe from them.

At my place of work it would be a disciplinary offence to have done this. It would be pointless though as all the links would be blocked when you click on them due to their social media/website policies.

If you use google it typically saves all your logins and passwords, can’t remember off the top of my head how to find it. Best is to use ChatGPT for step by step instructions how to find!

My DH was allowed to keep his number (but not the phone itself).