They left and deleted all their emails

[Surreality22]

Colleague I was managing has left the company after working their notice. They have been quite problematic, lazy and making mistakes. They were supposed to send me some information I needed prior to them finishing and they didn't. I also wanted to know if there was anything outstanding which hadn't been dealt with. So IT gave me access to their emails to check for the missing info. Not only was it not there in sent/draft emails but they'd deleted everything out their inbox up until they left, along with nearly everything in the sent and deleted emails folder.

I'm just wondering why someone would do this? It wouldn't even occur to me to delete work emails when leaving a job, and these would have likely been info sent by colleagues/work requests that need dealing with. I imagine IT can retrieve them hopefully but wondering on the rationale behind doing this, is it just to be a dick and cause me more work?

This thread has shown that organisations are very different. I work for one where there should absolutely not be any key information that is only in an individual's email. Anything important that needs to be saved/referred to later is stored centrally. So the emails in an individual's mailbox are really just transient or for their own personal use. It would be totally normal to delete them regularly and/or not to save any on a daily basis!

I hadn't realised until I read this thread how many organisations clearly use individual's mailboxes as information stores. In that case, yes, you clearly can't delete anything as it will be important!

Hard to know if OP is being unreasonable or not, without understanding her organisations approach to email and information stored in them.

We would be expected to delete all emails, in fact probably told to do so. All essential and important information and files are stored elsewhere.

Because their job was 100% remote working, it was assumed that stuff was saved directly to the work laptop

@LakieLady - I hope there was an investigation into how this situation came about. The business has mismanaged its data and someone has cocked up on the management/supervision of that individual.

I think there's some confusion between a mailbox and an email account in the thread. Deleting a local inbox on a PC would not normally delete the entire email account (if it's set-up correctly, maybe a big If there).

But it's far too common that email trails are the only record of business interactions. I come across it a lot. It's not right, and it's not best practice. But it's the way things are, particularly in SMEs outside the tech sector.

Your IT department can recover them. It's their mainframe after all.

I did this. I had a line manager who knew nothing about the job I did and who provided no feedback on the 40 page handover document I had prepared for her.

My concern was that she would search my emails for specific info, find what she thought was the answer and not know enough to realise that the info either wasn't complete or had changed. I was moving within the industry and had my reputation to consider and didn't want any conversations happening that made it seem as though I had made a decision when I hadn't. Everything was included in the handover document.

I spend my last days in a job forwarding anything important and deleting the rest. It's a nice tidy up task.

Why didn't you schedule handover meetings to get the information you needed before they left?

Most Outlook is now through MS 365 and MS retain data for 30 days. So it could be deleted from an inbox but back ups will not be affected.

However it's also common for companies to retain additional copies of email for legal & compliance reasons so have services running in parallel which retain inboxes for considerably longer. Cloud means copies are usually stored elsewhere so deleting your own view of data doesn't mean its gone forever.

We have to routinely delete out emails as we are reminded emails are a not storage area and for data protection etc
All important trails are put in secure places and once email hits a year I delete and if leaving would delete all as would forward any that needed actioninG and anything important would be where it should be

Not true, your work email account and everything in it belongs to the company, it's not personal information it's business information (or it's supposed to be). Ylan individuals permission isn't needed to share it if there's a business need.

the only people who need to "give consent" are the relevant managers working for the employer, makes no difference if the employer is a sole trader or a mega-corporation.

There is no "privacy" whatsoever when you use hardware and software supplied to you by your employer for work purposes. NONE.

If you want to conduct any private/personal business use your own hardware and software - and your own internet connection. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.

Take that from someone who takes no shit from any employer.

@Dotjones

wrong re the data laws in most companies.
any data on a company email is company property, you are an employee not customer.

you will have signed so in a contract.

@GiltEdges

rhey will be a policy and they were asked to keep by a manager ( as I understand) which is a reasonable request so they did destroy

if I was the manager I would have ensured they were kept before last pay approved

ps surprised they IT don't have a pre data back up , good IT groups do.

I don't ever delete emails as they are key for the area of finance I work in. I wouldn't want to leave my colleagues in a mess if I had something they may need in my email.

This is one of the reasons I have never used work email for personal stuff; I have my Hotmail on in the background lol

Even though I'm about to raise a grievance against my horrid boss before I leave my current workplace, I still wouldn't delete all my emails just to be vindictive; I'm sure IT can pull them back up.

One particularly disgruntled employee I knew of deleted all the key project files when they left, as well as their emails It took IT ages to get the project files back, because he was in IT too. Made me think something awful must have gone on in that team for him to screw over his colleagues so badly.

Quite. And the OP was obviously so enamoured of then that it's perplexing why they might delete anything helpful....

Those saying they delete in case they have been critical of colleagues or had a moan please stop. Saying anything like this in an email is so inappropriate, these days an email may as well be a printed letter on company letterhead. If you wouldn’t post it snail mail don’t email it.

Well it turned out they lied to me about stuff and there's a mess they've left that I'll need to sort out.

I've got various sad/difficult stuff going on in my life just now and this is all I need. Really fucking fed up. At least it's the weekend.

Sounds like you’re well shot of her op

@biedrona you don’t need consent to access company emails.

I left my last job with around 26,000 emails. I did clean up some of my sent items, and some of the irrelevant email. Perhaps one day I might return to that workplace and role, so emails would be useful.

It was standard practice that for anyone who left, their supervisor or replacement had their inbox added to their account.

As I've worked in IT, I am aware emails can be accessed and restored from backups, I rarely used email for personal reasons, and never ever used it to bitch about coworkers - and would always immediately delete anything personal other coworkers sent me. (and delete from the deleted items)

So many people think that deleting emails will save them - not if they are then sitting in their deleted folder, or they haven't deleted their sent items.

Many years ago a coworker quit on the spot because their manager was a bully. The manager asked me to give them access to the inbox. I refused to do this until I had discussed it with my manager. This was in the early days and IT law has changed a lot since then.

In the meantime, I logged into this person's email account and deleted all their personal emails, and especially the ones between them and other coworkers where they complained about this manager.

I never gave them full access to the inbox - but as the emails had been placed into separate client folders, I exported these and imported them for the manager. They weren't happy about it and I knew they wanted to find dirt on this person.

Many years ago before cloud storage, I used backup tapes on the server, which I would replace each day.

At the end of the month - I did an end of month backup. These were kept and never saved over.

There were also 5 separate tapes for weekly backups, and then there was the nightly backup tapes.

Depending on when requests were made, majority of files or email could always be recovered.

I am assuming this is something that varies in different workplaces/job types. In my line if work it is very process driven with very formal rules on what needs to be saved when and where. So a final decision would be saved on a central file but all the discussion etc leading to that is not necessary.

I don't understand how it could work to have all email inboxes accessible walkways for every employee ever. How does that work? What should they have done?

Not directly related to his thread, but more an unbelievable case of the opposite happening.
The women who become the boss couldn't stand the previous boss, so she ordered the IT department to irretrievably delete a database created by the previous boss - declared it useless rubbish.
A database that took lots of money and time to build. And not useless at all, so the sysadmin who done the deleting told me.

I haven’t deleted all emails when leaving a job, only personal ones. But I would not really expect anyone to access my inbox and I have never needed to access anybody else’s inbox. I think that is a bit low to be honest, if you need to know something then you get a proper handover before they go. How on earth do you have the time to read somebody else’s entire email history.

It’s not your inbox, though. It belongs to the company. It’s up to the company to decide.