The following in the policy that was in place prior to February 2012 when WBS ran its own staff email system. The aims of that policy are retained although the actual application may be limited by wider university policies and practices. As these are determined or agreed this page will be updated.

The day after a member of WBS leaves the following changes are made:

• The email password is changed and is sent to their (former) group secretary or similar. They, or someone else nominated by the Head of Group, will be able to log into the account to 1) deal with any new business email and 2) check whether any existing mail needs to be retained for business purposes.
• The account is removed from all address books.

One month after the last working day the account is deleted and is irretrievable. Requests to keep email accounts for longer than the one month limit are rarely granted and must be made via the WBS Executive Officer.

Given the above, our strong recommendation, as included on our Email Best Practice guide, is that users create a separate private account for their personal email to prevent problems of other staff having access to their personal email or issues of contactibility once a staff members leaves. Organisations such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or others will provide free web-based accounts that can be used for this purpose. Users should not attempt to install other email clients on their computers as this is likely to cause configuration problems.