Personal Use of Business Emails

While free email services like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo are widely available, some employees still prefer to use their business email accounts for their personal correspondence so everything comes to one email address.

While many companies look beyond this and consider email a quasi-benefit of the company, closing the business also means discontinuing the domain registration and with that, the email benefit.  Eventually, me@mycompany.com will cease to work and all the email stored in that account will be deleted. 

Best practice is to research all the email addresses that exist with the company and discuss the importance now of migrating the staff’s personal use of the company email to a different email address so they have time to create the new email account, notify everyone in their address book, and potentially even change User-IDs for services where they use the company email address that will go away someday. 

Likewise, for the small business owner, start well in advance by creating a Gmail or Outlook account and transition the business email addresses you use for things like your home utilities, doctor’s portals, Social Security, and more. 

Having a user-ID/password manager in place can help you quickly find all the places you are using mycompany.com requiring change to <<myname>>@gmail.com before discontinuing domain registration of mycompany.com. 

Remember to also change all the password recovery email settings used with important personal business websites — having Facebook, the Social Security Administration, or a doctor’s portal send your password reset emails to an email address no longer available can create hours of work and frustration trying to regain access to important accounts.