Key employee owner transition of email records

searcher profile

September 22, 2021

by a searcher from Princeton University in San Francisco, CA, USA

I am working toward closing a small business acquisition and came across an unexpected issue - the main owner and key employee has used their office email as personal email for a couple of decades and is not willing to give me access to their historical email at the time of closing because they have all their personal things in the email account. This person owns all the client relationships and corresponds with all the clients on a regular basis.

I would appreciate any suggestions on how to work through this issue!
Thank you.

0
6
116
Replies
6
commentor profile
Reply by a searcher
from Carnegie Mellon University in San Jose, CA, USA
I had a similar situation many years ago. Assuming the owner can separate the contacts by business and personal, this problem can be solved technically. Here are the high level steps:
1. Add both the official email account and another personal email account (as IMAP accounts) to a desktop email client . I used MS Outlook, but there might be other clients support the same.
2. Make a new folder in the official account that would temporarily hold all private emails
3. Create a new Rule that will move all emails From/To the personal contacts.
4. Run the rule and make sure all personal emails are in that new folder. It will be much easier if those personal email addresses are in Outlook client contacts.
5. Simply drag and drop the new folder from official account to the personal account in Outlook client
6. The folder and emails will be removed from official account and accessible from the personal account. The official email address will now be personal email free. However, that account might still receive new personal emails - that the owner needs to address anyways as he moves on and you have the right to freeze the account.
commentor profile
Reply by a searcher
from Northwestern University in Boston, MA, USA
I’ve had this come up a few times at a larger company I was working at while buying a subsidiary from another large firm where the emails where co-mingled with the parent. It happens when trying to pull apart CRM systems too. It’s “technically possible” to have a program written that extracts or redacts a duplicate email file, but it can be VERY expensive. At least 5 years ago there was no off the shelf solution. Unless something has come on the market, I’d guess this is cost prohibitive, but it’s worth a look around to see if one exists. Even when I had virtually limitless resources, I’d often opt to have someone manually search through the customer correspondents and make a “fresh start sheet” Either way, it’s time-consuming and painful because it really can’t be delegated… only someone that has a good understanding of the business can do the work.
commentor profile
+4 more replies.
Join the discussion