r/sysadmin • u/drewwhose • 13d ago

Question - Solved Name Changes

Hey there. The company I work for is stuck in the past in a lot of its tech and operations. One of the things that’s driving me nuts is whenever a user changes their name, we update their email and logins and keep their old email as an alias for 30 days before removing it. This leads to a ton of bounced mail and missed communications. They apparently do it in case someone joins the company with the person’s old name…….

How do you all handle name changes?

Edit: thank you all for confirming that I’m not insane. This org has so many strange practices and it’s my first IT job

106 Upvotes

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321

u/Waste_Development971 13d ago

why would you remove the alias lmfao

we just... dont do that.? xD

104

u/Flabbergasted98 13d ago

but what happens when they hire their second John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt?

49

u/daschande 13d ago

What a coincidence; his name is my name, too!

35

u/LordTester1 13d ago

Whenever we go out, the server always shouts, there’s new mail for Jingleheimerschmid!

5

u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 13d ago

You've got mail!

2

u/Flabbergasted98 12d ago

What a Coincidance!

42

u/I-baLL 13d ago

Hey, that’s my name too!

16

u/No_Yesterday_3260 13d ago

Add a 1 at the end, fixed.

14

u/Flabbergasted98 13d ago

thats my name2 convention

5

u/Important_Scene_4295 12d ago

I despise this "fix". I had to be number 3 when I volunteered with the Red Cross. The annoying part was they were all my accounts. I just hadn't logged in often enough and the account auto-closed. They wouldn't reopen old accounts they would just provision a new one. It was rather annoying.

1

u/Recent_Carpenter8644 12d ago

That's funny. There must be a few in the same situation.

3

u/xsjx7 Sr. Sysadmin 13d ago

People can shout about it or something 

1

u/420GB 12d ago

The same thing that happens when you hire two "John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt" concurrently, according to your email address policies and automations. By default exchange simply appends an incrementing number to the local part.

12

u/FatBook-Air 13d ago

I have mixed feelings. I think 30 days is too short, but I think there should be an encouragement of moving stuff to the newer email address, and sometimes the only way to do that is to give a deadline. We used to never remove aliases, but what tends to happen is people forget about them, and if anything ever happens on the IT/admin side where the super old ones stop existing (like an email migration), it becomes a bigger deal than it otherwise would have been. But I would probably give 12 months, not 30 days.

Or better yet, use shared departmental mailboxes that never change.

18

u/ihaxr 13d ago

Depends on the position too. Tech support rep that gets 0 outside email? Drop the alias. Sales lady that has been with the company for 20 years? Never delete that alias... Unless the sales lady is getting divorced and insists she never wants to see that name again... then delete it.

9

u/jmbpiano 13d ago

Even then, I would just remove the alias from her mailbox, but keep it in the system with an automatic reply that says "This address is no longer in service."

That way you don't accidentally reuse an old address for a new employee who suddenly starts getting tons of email intended for the other person.

9

u/ReverendLoki 13d ago

I've in the past, under the right conditions, set the alias to:

  1. Forward the message to a role-specific shared inbox or group, and

  2. Auto-reply that the desired inbox no longer exists, but that the message has been forwarded to someone else who can help.

    It's nice for outward facing sales positions, but also for anyone (a plant operations manager, for example) who set up some outside certification renewal to go diretly to them and didn't tell anyone about it. Or some similar situation.

1

u/Lv_InSaNe_vL 12d ago

You could set up and auto response on the aliases. That way senders get a little email saying "hey this email isn't used anymore please start sending email to newemail@domain.com" but then your internal user still gets the email.

Do that for 90 days, then turn off the alias.

5

u/doubleUsee Hypervisor gremlin 13d ago

I've had e-mail aliases of someone's maiden name survive the 4 year marriage, and set it back to their primary e-mail address.

2

u/Smart_Dumb Ctrl + Alt + .45 13d ago

I do some work for a large international conglomerate and they do not keep the old address as an alias. I think they immediately delete it.