Whose job is it to capture a departing employee's email mailbox before the account is deleted?

When someone leaves an organization, their mailbox often contains records that must be kept long after they are gone. Deleting the account before those messages are captured can destroy evidence, break compliance, and expose the organization to legal and regulatory risk. So whose job is it to prevent that? The honest answer is that capturing a departing employee’s email is a shared responsibility with clearly defined roles — not a task that belongs to any single person.

The roles involved

• The employee (ideally). Before departure, the outgoing employee should identify and properly file or flag email that documents business decisions, transactions, or obligations. They know the context best, so doing this while they are still on board produces the cleanest result.
• The manager or supervisor. The manager is typically accountable for ensuring offboarding is done correctly. They confirm which records exist, designate who will inherit ongoing matters, and authorize the next steps. Accountability usually rests here even when others do the hands-on work.
• The records or information governance officer. This role defines what must be captured, how long it must be retained under the applicable retention schedule, and where it should ultimately reside. They translate policy into the rules IT and managers follow.
• IT or the email administrator. IT performs the technical capture — exporting, archiving, or placing the mailbox on hold — and only deletes the account after capture is verified. IT executes; it does not decide retention.

The governing principle

Email is judged by content, not by who held the account. A message is a record if it documents a business activity, regardless of the sender. The departing employee’s status does not shorten any retention requirement that already applies.

Because of this, mature organizations build a mandatory records hold into the offboarding workflow: the account cannot be deleted until the records role and IT confirm the mailbox has been preserved according to the retention schedule. Where litigation, an audit, or a public-records request is anticipated, a legal hold overrides any routine deletion entirely.

In short — the employee surfaces the records, the manager is accountable, the records officer sets the rules, and IT preserves the mailbox before deletion. For more on managing these records over their lifecycle, see /topics/email-messaging/.