In this article, I will share the way I found by trial and error, more convenient to delete a Google Workspace account, when an employee has left the company, preventing them from losing data or important documents.
When you are the IT guy, and suddenly you are told that someone has left the company and that you need to urgently change the password and prevent that person from accessing the email immediately, it usually comes tied with some other activities you must do.
Of course, if you are like me and no one explained what to do, please look at this article I wrote; I hope it will be helpful.
I wish someone had explained this to me before, so I went ahead and decided to write this article.
This article considers that your company is using Google Workspace.
It is required to do some preparation. We need to take care of the following:
1.-You will need access to the account you need to delete. You will need the password, so the first thing is to change the password.
To do that, go to Google Admin and then choose the user that you need to change the password, which is the same user that will be deleted. I recommend not selecting the box when asking the user to change the password when they sign in.
Please take note of the new password since you will need it a bit later in this process.
Replacing any recovery email and recovery phone with your own email and cell phone number is also recommended. Recovery information is used to secure user accounts at sign-in and during account recovery.
2.-The next step is to Enable IMAP in both accounts, source, and destination email accounts. To do that, please go ahead and open your browser, and when logging in to Gmail, select Add another account, and you can use the credentials of the Gmail account that will be deleted.
Next, please go to Settings (gear symbol), click on See all Settings, and then go to IMAP access to ensure that IMAP is enabled. From here, make sure that there is no limit on the Folder size limits – Do not limit the number of messages in an IMAP folder (default).
3.-Then, please go back to the Google Admin, and go to the user that you will be deleting. Ensure to turn off all kinds of security, like 2-step authentication, and, most importantly, turn off login challenges.
1.-First, you need to go to Google Admin; you can click the link below.
Once you are finished with the preparation, please do the following.
2.-From there, you need to go to Users
3.-Normally, the first step you must take care of is changing the password and preventing the user from leaving the company to access his emails.
To do this, please do the following:
From the list of users, you will need to select the user that will be deleted and, first, reset the password; I recommend not selecting the box when asking the user to change the password when they sign in.
Please take note of the new password since you will need it a bit later in this process.
4.-Once doing that, you will be ready to delete the user. We must first migrate the user’s emails and documents to delete the user. To do that, you can go to the user that you want to delete/migrate and select Delete User.
5.-From the menu, please select Migrate the user’s existing email.
6.-On the first field, please go ahead and click on Add user
7.-From here, you must enter the Source Email (the email you want to delete and migrate data from), Password, and Google Workspace Email (an account you will be migrating to).
8.-That will start the process of data migration. Depending on how many emails need to be transferred, it can take a while.
9.-Once it is finished, you can transfer the rest of the data. To do that, please select Transfer from Data in other Apps. Select the user you want to transfer data to (for example, a supervisor).
10.-Select data to transfer:
Google Docs, I would recommend including the files that are not shared with anyone.
Calendar, I recommend releasing all the calendar resources booked in events organized by the user.
Brand Accounts, Brand Accounts, and their data will be transferred to a new owner.
Data Studio includes Assets that are not shared with anyone.
11.-When ready, please click on DELETE USER to start with the transfer of the remaining data.
12.-You will receive a notification like this:
“This user’s data is being transferred. You’ll get an email when that’s complete, and the user is deleted.”
“When the transfer is still in progress, the user’s account will be suspended to prevent them from accessing their account.”
“After the deletion, you have 20 days to restore the account, after which all the data will be permanently deleted.”
16.-You will receive an email with a notification saying that the deletion of the account from Google Workspace was successful.
After completing the transfer of all the data, you will need to add the email address of the person that was transferred the data, it is convenient to think about what is going to be redirected to all the emails.
For doing this, just with Google Admin, go to the account of the supervisor, and add the email address that was just deleted as an alternate email. That way, all incoming emails will be redirected to the supervisor.
