Step 6 · Switch over
Inbound-only email takeover
Your critical mailboxes will keep receiving mail for years after cessation. Inbound-only takeover keeps these messages accessible to successors, with no outgoing mail permitted — an essential protection against address impersonation.
Why this step matters
The lifespan of professional email addresses is
systematically underestimated. Three years after registry
removal, your contact@ still receives
warranty follow-ups, commercial solicitations,
administrative summons, GDPR requests from former
clients, lawyer correspondence. If you shut the mailbox,
these messages disappear silently. The sender will not
know you closed. The urgent message will not find its
recipient. And — more seriously — an impersonator could
later acquire the domain and send mail from your former
address.
Inbound-only takeover solves all three problems in one operation: incoming mail is preserved, the address stays reserved for the entire contract duration, and no outgoing mail is possible — neither from you nor from an impersonator.
What actually happens
- MX reconfiguration. The domain's MX records are switched to Archivum's infrastructure. Incoming mail now lands in our secured inboxes rather than in the original mail system. The operation is transparent to senders — their mail arrives, full stop.
- Removal of outgoing SPF, DKIM, DMARC records. No service can legitimately send from the domain anymore. Impersonation attempts are flagged as unauthenticated by recipient servers (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) and end up in spam.
- Reception and indexing. Each received message is preserved, indexed by sender, date, subject and destination mailbox. Attachments are analysed to identify potentially important documents (invoices, contracts, formal notices).
- Sender notice. Depending on your choice: an informative auto-reply announcing cessation and follow-up orientation, or an added header on messages forwarded for consultation. Follow-up contact (liquidator, successors, alternative address) is set in the contract — not in a public message.
- Consultation by grantees. The persons designated in the contract consult incoming mail through a secured interface, with strong authentication. Each consultation is logged. See access grant.
- No outgoing mail. This rule is absolute. If a grantee needs to answer a sender, they do so from their own personal address, mentioning their role as former director or successor. See email continuity.
Specific cases
Named mailboxes of former employees. Unless a specific legal obligation applies (ongoing litigation, employment-law-bound archives), named mailboxes are closed at the end of the employment contract, in line with French data-protection authority recommendations. Only function mailboxes (contact@, accounting@…) are taken over inbound-only.
Distribution lists and newsletters. They are disabled and can no longer send. Subscribers remain in the GDPR register for the planned retention duration, and can request their erasure at any time through the consultation channel.
Highly exposed addresses (contact@, info@). These mailboxes receive a significant share of spam and phishing. Archivum's advanced filtering (anti-spam, anti-phishing) stays active on preserved messages, to avoid uselessly archiving tens of thousands of illegitimate messages.
Scope your email takeover
The perimeter of mailboxes to take over is validated at initial scoping. A few minutes are enough to list the critical addresses.