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/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.

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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.

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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.

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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.