What happens to your project emails when people leave?

Every project-based firm has lived through this. Someone leaves. A few months later, a project manager needs an email from that person's inbox. Maybe it is a submission confirmation. Maybe it is a scope change a client is now disputing. Maybe it is something no one thought was important at the time.

The inbox has been archived or decommissioned. The email is gone. And the scramble begins.

In AEC and professional services, this is not an edge case. It is the default. The average AEC firm loses 15 to 20% of its workforce annually. On a 50-person business, that is up to 10 people a year walking out the door and taking their project correspondence with them.

The problem nobody talks about until it is too late

The risk is not staff turnover itself. That is a given in project-based industries. The risk is that most firms have no system in place to separate project emails from the people who sent them.

When emails live in personal inboxes, they belong to the person. When that person leaves, the emails either go with them or end up locked in a shared mailbox that nobody can search effectively.

This creates three problems that tend to surface at the worst possible moment.

The first is project continuity. When a new team member picks up a project mid-flight, they have no access to the communication history that shaped every decision made before they arrived. Context is lost. Questions get asked that were already answered. Work gets repeated.

The second is disputes. When a client challenges what was agreed or a contractor disputes a scope change, the evidence that matters most is the email trail. If that trail is scattered across personal inboxes, some of which no longer exist, the firm cannot defend its position.

The third is the IT burden. Every time someone needs a former colleague's emails, the help desk gets pulled in. The search process is manual, slow and collaborative. It often involves multiple tools and multiple people. And sometimes it ends with nothing to show for it.

What this looked like at one firm

SJCA Engineers & Surveyors is a civil engineering firm with over 100 staff managing 30+ active projects at any given time. Before implementing Ideagen Mail Manager, their email filing situation was what Aaron Robbins, IT Systems Administrator, described as "the wild, wild west."

There was no company standard. Everyone filed emails their own way or didn't file at all. When someone left, Aaron's team would go through a multi-step process to try to recover their project correspondence: grant access to the shared mailbox, search classic Outlook, try Outlook for the web, then fall back to Office 365 backup software. It pulled in at least two people every time. It was, in Aaron's words, "quite time consuming and cumbersome."

In one case, a project manager needed to prove a submission had been made. A client was chasing. Aaron and the project manager searched through every tool available to them and came up empty. The result was rework that should never have happened on a project that was otherwise on track.

The trigger for change came from SJCA's director of engineering, who had solved this problem at a previous firm and brought the idea with him. The goal was simple: get every project email into one searchable location so the firm is never caught without the information it needs.

What changed

SJCA rolled out Ideagen Mail Manager in under two weeks. The team was filing consistently within a month.

The key decision was enforcement. Rather than relying on staff to remember to file, SJCA locked down the configuration so that every project-related email triggers a filing prompt. On every send. On every open. Staff cannot skip it or turn it off.

Aaron acknowledged that this was invasive. The concession was that once an email is filed, the system does not touch the person's inbox. Staff keep their own mailbox management habits. The filing decision is the only non-negotiable part.

Training was automated through the firm's existing training management system. New joiners are assigned Ideagen Mail Manager training from day one and have access to the full email history of every project they are assigned to, including projects that predated the rollout.

The result is that when a project closes at SJCA, the full email record is packaged up alongside the rest of the project data. If a question surfaces six months or two years later, the emails are already there. No scrambling. No pulling IT in. No hoping someone filed it properly.

Aaron puts it simply: "We don't use it every day to fight fires. But we know that if a dispute or a client query comes up, every project email is there. That peace of mind is worth more than any single feature."

What to take from this

The lesson from SJCA is not that every firm needs to lock down filing prompts or automate training in the same way. The lesson is that the gap between "we have our emails" and "we can find our emails when it matters" is enormous. Most firms do not discover how wide that gap is until they are already in the middle of a problem.

Staff turnover is inevitable. Losing project emails because of it is not.

If the problem Aaron described sounds familiar, the webinar recording walks through the full story, from what went wrong before to what changed after, including a live walkthrough of how the filing and search works in practice.