Personal Email on Previous Employer Email Account

TELLIT01

jonnygee2 wrote: »

Either that, or you need to try and remember which internal IT staff member you were most friendly with and see if they'd do you a favour by adding an out of office to your account.

If the account is locked, anybody accessing it could find themselves on the wrong end of a disciplinary if they did so without authorisation. If the uni is being deliberately awkward, doing anything to the account would be high risk for the person doing it.

jonnygee2

If the account is locked, anybody accessing it could find themselves on the wrong end of a disciplinary if they did so without authorisation.

A disciplinary for putting an out of office on saying this person no longer works here?

IT support are normally allowed to access accounts for such things. But it'd be up to them, wouldn't hurt to ask. They work in IT and would know the policy

Alternatively an old manager or colleague could just put a request in.

unforeseen

jonnygee2 wrote: »

A disciplinary for putting an out of office on saying this person no longer works here?

IT support are normally allowed to access accounts for such things. But it'd be up to them, wouldn't hurt to ask. They work in IT and would know the policy

Alternatively an old manager or colleague could just put a request in.

It would be a disciplinary if they did it off their own bat without authority. It security tend to be hot on chasing up unauthorised changes as it also brings into question what else has been done for a mate or as a casual request.

They need to be requested to do it by somebody with the relevant authority to make any changes to a locked account to be safe.

jonnygee2

It would be a disciplinary if they did it off their own bat without authority.

Depends, in many places it's standard policy to put out of offices on deactivated accounts, it could just have been a step that was forgotten. But again, you are working off policies you have no idea about. The OP could just ask someone who actually works there, instead of rely on complete guesses about what this universities IT policy looks like. If the IT person says a request needs to go in, they can just ask a collegue.

unforeseen

It may be as simple as the pc account is disabled which means that the mailbox can't be accessed. Standard practice in most places. Person leaves, pc account immediately disabled. Knock on effect? Mail account still live but inaccessible for all intents and purposes by original owner.

Undervalued

unforeseen wrote: »

It may be as simple as the pc account is disabled which means that the mailbox can't be accessed. Standard practice in most places. Person leaves, pc account immediately disabled. Knock on effect? Mail account still live but inaccessible for all intents and purposes by original owner.

Maybe in the commercial world but far less so in academia. Many retired academics in the more traditional universities keep their university email address for life. My contract used to specifically say "reasonable personal use of email and IT systems is allowed".

Nicki

Undervalued wrote: »

Maybe in the commercial world but far less so in academia. Many retired academics in the more traditional universities keep their university email address for life. My contract used to specifically say "reasonable personal use of email and IT systems is allowed".

Hmm. But the OP hasn’t retired. It looks in fact like they were summarily dismissed - they say the whole exit process took a week which I’d have thought is pretty unusual in academia for a “political” parting of the ways

If the university has concerns about OP’s conduct of any kind, this all makes a lot more sense and they are unlikely to change their mind having got the OP out the door quickly.

The best solution, given OP says they have their full contacts list, is to send out an email to all giving the new email address. But given the speed of the termination, it won’t be the lack of OOO on the email account which is causing the damage to their reputation and so they should be working on what their own exit explanation is and letting that be known to their contacts to the extent the settlement agreement permits this.

TELLIT01

jonnygee2 wrote: »

A disciplinary for putting an out of office on saying this person no longer works here?

IT support are normally allowed to access accounts for such things. But it'd be up to them, wouldn't hurt to ask. They work in IT and would know the policy

Alternatively an old manager or colleague could just put a request in.

I working in IT support for over 30 years and it was certainly not 'normal' for IT staff to access accounts without permission. It's one thing for a member of staff to contact IT and ask them to do something, it's a very different situation to accessing a 'locked' account of a former staff member.

getmore4less

I am going to have to move from trying to help, to what on earth have yo done to p**s them off this much..

Middlestitch

jonnygee2 wrote: »

Most academics have some sort of an international network. It doesn't make you Noam Chomsky!

Doesn't need to. Academic grapevines are pretty effective and the networks tend to be fairly close knit, even for relatively junior staff.