Leaving a Job: How to Take Your Email With You, Properly

Ask before you export, get the answer in writing, and do it at least two weeks before your last day. That is the method. The rest is knowing which menu to click and which format to end up in.

People get this wrong in one of two directions: they take nothing and lose a decade of their own professional correspondence, or they take everything on the final afternoon and end up holding a copy of a customer database they should never have touched.

Where the line falls, and where nobody can draw it for you

There is no universal rule about who owns what in a work mailbox: it depends on your country, your contract, your employer’s policies and the kind of content. Anyone stating it flatly on the internet, this article included, is guessing about your case. What you can do is sort the mail into three piles and be honest about which is which.

Plainly personal. Payslips, your contract and its amendments, training certificates, appraisals you wrote, a reference somebody sent you, the private messages that landed there because it was your address for eleven hours a day.

Plainly the company’s. Customer lists, pricing, source code, unreleased plans, contracts with third parties, anything marked confidential. And the sharpest case of the lot: anything containing other people’s personal data. A folder of client correspondence is a folder of personal data about identifiable people. Copying it to your own laptop moves that data somewhere it has no business being, and under the GDPR or its equivalent where you live, that is what turns a quiet resignation into a formal complaint. This one is not a matter of asking nicely first. Leave it.

In between. Your own sent mail, the threads where you did the work, project history you might need to describe one day. This is where people get into trouble: it feels obviously yours and routinely contains material that obviously is not.

The two-line email that ends the argument before it starts

This is the most useful thing in the article. Before you touch anything, send this to HR or your manager:

Before my last day I’d like to keep a copy of my own work correspondence and my personal records — payslips, contract, certificates. Could you confirm that’s fine and tell me if there’s anything you want excluded?

Keep the reply. It costs two minutes and removes any ambiguity about whether you took something without permission. It often gets you a better outcome than you asked for, because many companies would rather run the export themselves. And if the answer is no, you find out while there is still time to discuss it.

Your account dies on your last day, and nobody will remind you

Deprovisioning usually runs automatically on the termination date, and in sales, finance and regulated work access is sometimes cut the day you give notice rather than the day you leave. Either way there is no warning: one morning the password stops working, and by then the mailbox is not yours to ask about.

There is one case where you should not export at all. If the mailbox is under a legal hold or caught up in an eDiscovery request, it has been frozen deliberately and copying from it is a serious problem. If anyone has mentioned litigation, an audit or a regulator, ask first.

Otherwise, start two weeks out. Export, then open the result and check it is complete while you still have access to fix it.

How to export, depending on what you use

Google Workspace. Google Takeout exports the mailbox as MBOX, and the full procedure is here. One catch specific to work accounts: your administrator can disable Takeout for the domain, and many do. Check before you plan around it, because a large export can take days to be ready.

Outlook and Microsoft 365. Desktop Outlook on Windows exports through File → Open & Export → Import/Export → Export to a file → Outlook Data File (.pst); Outlook for Mac produces an .olm through its export command. Neither PST nor OLM is an open format; both need Outlook to read. Get the file, then convert it to MBOX. The browser version and the new Outlook client have no export of this kind — you need the classic desktop app.

Apple Mail. Select the mailbox, then Mailbox → Export Mailbox… and pick a destination. What you get is a folder ending in .mbox with the mail inside it, which surprises people; that structure is explained here.

Thunderbird. Nothing to export: the files in your profile folder already are MBOX files, one per folder, without an extension. Copy them out and they open as they are.

Convert it this week, not in five years

If you end up with a PST or an OLM, convert it while the tools are installed and the details are fresh.

The reason is boring and completely reliable: in five years you will not have Outlook on your machine. No licence, no work account to activate it with, no patience to install a mail client to read one message. A proprietary container is a bet that one program will still be there at the exact moment you need it — precisely the moment you will have neither the software nor the time. MBOX is plain text with a marker line between messages, and any reader on any system opens it.

Where to keep it, and how to find one contract in it years later

Two copies in different places, and a filename your future self can read. export.pst is not a filename; acme-2018-2026-work-mail.mbox is a label.

You will come back to this file for one reason: someone will ask about a specific agreement, promise or date, years later and in a hurry. So the archive has to be searchable, not merely stored. A reader with proper search operators — sender, date range, attachments, exact phrases — turns an afternoon of scrolling into four results.

Do that search locally. A work archive holds other people’s addresses and material you were legitimately party to but do not own, and uploading it to a website to look at it is the one action that turns a careful export into an incident. Mbox Viewer reads MBOX files on your Mac or PC with no account and no connection; mailboxes up to 1 GB open free.

If you are the one handling departures

Decide the policy before somebody resigns, not during the notice period. Write down what leavers may keep, put it in the offboarding checklist, and offer to run the export yourself: a controlled export of a defined set is far safer than someone forwarding four hundred emails to a personal address, which is what an unexplained no tends to produce. Then keep the departing mailbox as long as your obligations require, in an open format that whoever inherits it can read without a licence nobody renewed.