How to Keep Your Emails and Contacts When You Leave a Job
When you leave a job, IT usually disables your mailbox within days — sometimes the moment you hand in your notice. Everything in it goes with it: years of your own correspondence, the threads that hold context you'll need later, and the contacts of people you actually worked with. This guide covers how to save what's yours before the account goes dark, and how to keep it searchable afterwards.
Save your own correspondence and the professional contacts you personally built a relationship with. Do not export customer lists, confidential documents, or anything your employment agreement or NDA covers. When in doubt, leave it. This guide is about not losing your own history — not about taking your employer's data.
How to keep your email and contacts
Do it before your last day
Access is the whole game. Once the account is suspended you usually can't get back in, and asking IT to re-enable it later is slow and often refused. Start while you still have a working login.
Export your mailbox
Outlook / Microsoft 365: File → Open & Export → Import/Export → Export to a file → Outlook Data File (.pst). Include the folders you care about.
Gmail / Google Workspace: use Google Takeout (takeout.google.com), select Mail, and download the .mbox file. Note: on a managed Workspace account, an admin can disable Takeout — if so, do this on your last day, not after.
Export your contacts
Outlook: People → Manage → Export contacts to CSV. Gmail: Contacts → Export → Google CSV or vCard. Keep only the people you have a genuine professional relationship with.
Don't let it rot in a file
A .pst or .mbox on a hard drive is technically "saved" but practically useless: you need the right app installed, it isn't searchable across devices, and one dead disk loses all of it. That's the trap most people fall into.
Keep it searchable
Upload the export to a dedicated home for departed email so it stays full-text searchable from any browser — messages and the contact graph — instead of a dead file you'll never open. That's exactly what Evermail is built for.
Keep your email — searchable forever.
Upload your old mailbox once and search every message and contact from any browser, for a fraction of a live inbox.
Keep my email →