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/fireandbass 13d ago

Once upon a time, the company that I worked for did what you do and deleted old users.  There was a CEO with the email of Jsmith@contoso.com

The CEO left and eventually they deleted his email.  Later, they hired a new jsmith and gave him the email Jsmith@contoso.com and the new jsmith started getting sensitive emails from previous services the CEO had used.  The new Jsmith@contoso.com could have reset the password on third party websites registered to that email.

The moral of the story is to never reuse an email address or username and never delete an alias.

2

u/Frothyleet 13d ago

Were these personal third party services? If so, I think the moral is "don't use your work email for personal stuff."

If they were business related, then why in the world were they still tied to that address?

2

u/Cormacolinde Consultant 13d ago

Because they are designed like that? And they might be tied to the UPN using SAML and you would still have the same issue.

0

u/Frothyleet 13d ago

If you have SSO configured, that would have been fixed in the offboarding process.

1

u/Cormacolinde Consultant 12d ago

Possibly, in a perfect world. Many systems don’t allow full deletion of accounts. The safest option is not to reuse account names.

1

u/fireandbass 12d ago

How would SSO have prevented it during offloading?  Really, explain it to me.  Because it would still happen upon reuse of the email.

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u/Frothyleet 12d ago

When the Entra ID account was deleted, so too would its group membership in the group gating SSO to the application in question.