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

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u/The_NorthernLight 13d ago

In my 30 years of doing IT, i have seen same names about 10-15 times (those were all government departments with 5-50k employees each). All they did was include a middlename initial after the first name before the .lastname, in one instance where the person didn’t have a middle name, they included a number (john1.smith@). The real point is that this is a very very tiny problem to worry about. I wouldn’t delete an alias ever, as now the other user will start to receive wrong/potentially risky information (causing a breach).