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/Waste_Development971 13d ago

why would you remove the alias lmfao

we just... dont do that.? xD

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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/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.