Glossary — Email continuity
What is inbound-only email continuity?
Service consisting of taking over the critical email mailboxes of a company that is winding down, in inbound-only mode: incoming mail is preserved and accessible to successors, but no outgoing mail can be sent. Prevents the silent disappearance of addresses at the moment hosting payment lapses.
What it is
Email continuity takes over one or more critical addresses of a defunct company (typically contact@, accounting@, director@) and routes them to an archived environment we operate. The mode is deliberately asymmetric: incoming messages are received, classified, preserved; outgoing is disabled.
This choice protects successors: it prevents someone — not necessarily in bad faith — from using an address of the defunct company to engage a liability that no longer exists, or to communicate to partners who would believe the business was still going. Reading the received mail happens under access grants, logged like any other access.
Why it matters
Mail received after a cessation often contains decisive material: court summonses, formal notices, residual invoices, support requests, takeover proposals, administrative letters. Without continuity, those messages bounce silently: the sender gets a non-delivery report, the successor never knows they were contacted. The harm can be heavy: missed deadlines, lost remedies, reputational damage.
How Archivum approaches it
Email continuity is Archivum's third service line. The contract sets the addresses taken over, the duration, the successors authorised to read, and the end-of-period fate — final extraction to another provider, deletion, or extension. No outgoing address is opened: this is a deliberate choice, not an option.