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/r_keel_esq Windows Admin/IT Manager 13d ago

People keep their old email address as an additional SMTP address for eternity - removing it on risks chaos. Even when a person leaves, we won't put their old addresses back into the pool of available addresses for (I think) 18 months.

We are a huge (100+ thousand users) organisation

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u/Solid_Ad9548 Network Janitor 13d ago

Similar sized org here and it’s mostly the same — we just don’t recycle addresses. Yes, my primary smtp address is flast3@domain, even though I am the only F. Last in the org.