Closing or Selling a Business: What to Do With the Email

A business stops trading, the owner cancels everything in one afternoon, and six months later a customer's refund request, a tax authority letter and a supplier's final invoice all bounce. Or a business is sold, the buyer takes the website, and the seller's personal mailbox keeps receiving the new owner's orders. Both are avoidable. The email side of closing or selling a business is a short checklist, and most of it is about keeping things running for longer than feels necessary.

Quick answer

Keep the domain registered for at least two more years, keep one or two mailboxes live with an auto-reply that says what happened and where to write now, export every mailbox before you delete it, and keep the invoices and tax correspondence for as long as your country requires. If the business is sold, transfer the domain to the buyer, hand over the role mailboxes with new passwords, and move the seller's personal mail out first.

If the business is closing

1. Do not let the domain lapse. Renew it for two to three years. A dropped domain is bought by someone who will receive your customers' mail, including password resets for accounts still tied to it.
2. Decide which addresses stay live: usually hello@ or info@, accounts@ and the owner's own. Add the rest as members of a group that delivers to one of them, so the addresses keep working without a mailbox each.
3. Set an auto-reply on the live addresses from the mail app you keep them in: the business has closed, the date, who to contact for refunds, warranties or records, and whether a successor exists. Keep it factual.
4. Export every mailbox before deleting it. Over IMAP, a desktop client such as Thunderbird can download a whole mailbox to a local file; our mailbox export guide walks through it. Store the exports with the company records.
5. Change the contact email on the registrar, the bank, the tax authority, the company registry and every SaaS subscription to an address you will still read in two years, then cancel the subscriptions.
6. Revoke API keys, remove integrations and delete mailboxes for former staff; the offboarding checklist applies to everyone at once.
7. Put a calendar reminder for the domain renewal and for the date you can finally delete the records.

How long to keep the records

Tax and company law in most countries requires invoices, contracts and correspondence to be kept for several years after the business closes, commonly five to seven and in some places ten. Email is part of that: an exported mailbox is often the only copy of a supplier agreement or a customer dispute. Keep the exports in two places, one of them offline, and keep the domain alive for at least as long as the accounts might be queried. Our retention guide covers what to keep and what to delete.

If the business is being sold

1. List every email asset in the sale agreement: the domain, each role mailbox, the newsletter list, and the API keys used by the website and the shop.
2. Move the seller's personal correspondence out of the role mailboxes before handover. Anything in hello@ or accounts@ belongs to the business and goes with it; anything personal does not.
3. Transfer the domain to the buyer's registrar account, or at minimum change the registrant and contact details, and lift the registrar lock only for the transfer. The domain hijacking guide explains the lock.
4. Hand over the OquMail workspace, or create a fresh one for the buyer and move the domain across. Change every mailbox password on the day of handover; the seller should hold none of them afterwards.
5. Keep the seller's own name@ mailbox alive for a few months, checked from a mail app, with an auto-reply in that app pointing business matters to the new owner, then delete it.
6. Rotate API keys and integration passwords. A key created by the seller is a key the seller still has.
7. Update the Google Business Profile, the website footer and the social bios on handover day, so the buyer's team is the one customers reach.

What not to do

• Deleting everything on the last day. Mail keeps arriving for years, and a bounced address looks like a business that vanished with people's money.
• Forwarding the old business addresses to a personal Gmail and forgetting about it. Private customer data then sits in an unmanaged inbox indefinitely.
• Selling the website but keeping the domain in the seller's name. The buyer then depends on the seller for every DNS change.
• Letting the buyer inherit mailboxes with the old passwords and the old API keys.
• Using the dormant domain for a new venture while the old auto-reply is still running.

Common questions

Can I keep the mailboxes on the free plan while the company winds down?

Yes. The free plan has no expiry, so a closed business can keep hello@ and accounts@ alive with an auto-reply for as long as the domain is registered, at no cost beyond the domain renewal.

Should I delete the newsletter list?

If the business closes, send one final message announcing it and then delete the list; keeping subscriber data with no purpose creates privacy obligations with no benefit. If the business is sold, the list transfers with the business and subscribers should be told who now holds it.

What if the domain was registered in a staff member's name?

Fix it before anything else. Have the registrar move the domain into the company's or the owner's account now; a domain held by a former employee is the single most common way a closing business loses control of its email.