What Happens to Your Work Email When You're Laid Off (and How to Save It First)
Layoffs rarely come with a grace period for your inbox. In many companies, access is revoked the same day you're told — sometimes during the meeting. If years of your own email and your professional contacts live only in that account, they're gone the moment the login stops working. Here's what actually happens, and how to protect what's yours ahead of time.
What happens to the mailbox
When you're offboarded, IT either deletes the account or converts it to an "inactive" / archived state that only the company can access. Either way, you lose access. There's no personal copy unless you made one.
Why waiting doesn't work
People assume they can ask for their emails later. In practice, once you're gone the company has little reason (and sometimes legal reasons not) to re-open the account for you. The window is before access ends.
If you see it coming
Export your mailbox now
Outlook: File → Open & Export → Export to a .pst. Gmail/Workspace: Google Takeout → Mail → .mbox.
Export your contacts
The people you personally worked with — not customer/CRM data.
Save the handful of threads that matter most
Offers, references, project context, anything you may need to reference in your next role.
Your own correspondence and relationships — not confidential files, customer lists, or anything under NDA. Losing your history is the problem we're solving; creating a legal one isn't the fix.
Then make it usable. A raw export is a safety copy, not something you'll ever search. Upload it somewhere it stays instantly searchable from any browser — every message and every contact — so five years of work history survives the layoff instead of dying in a file you forget you have.
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 →