Setting up users and access without locking yourself out

Once a business has email on its own domain, the next question is who gets an account and what they can reach. It sounds trivial. It’s the part that, done carelessly, leaves a company with critical systems tied to one person’s login, or a former employee still reading the shared inbox a month after they left.

Here’s how to set up users and access so it holds up as the business grows and changes.

One account per person, on the domain

Everyone who works with you should have their own account on your domain, like [email protected], not a shared login and not a personal Gmail doing company work. Individual accounts let you see who did what, give each person the exact access they need, and remove it cleanly when they go. Shared logins feel simpler right up to the day you need to change the password and can’t remember who else was using it.

Keep the admin account separate

The account that controls everything, the admin, should not be the one you use for everyday email. Admin access is what adds and removes users, changes the billing and resets passwords. Keep it as its own login, used only when you need it, so a compromised day-to-day inbox doesn’t hand someone the keys to the whole setup. And make sure more than one trusted person can reach it, so the business isn’t locked out if one someone is away or unreachable.

Give people only what they need

Not everyone needs to see everything. A new starter needs their mailbox and the drives for their work, not the billing account or the customer list. Setting this up as roles rather than person by person saves time later. When the next person joins in that job, they get the same access without anyone having to decide it all again.

Shared inboxes and aliases

Some addresses belong to a function, not a person. hello@ or accounts@ works better as a shared inbox, or an alias that lands in the right people’s mail, than as a login of its own. Messages don’t vanish when someone’s off, and nobody’s guarding the password to an inbox three people need.

Off-boarding is the part everyone skips

When someone leaves, their access should leave with them the same day. Their mail forwarded or handed over, their logins closed, and anything only they could reach passed to someone else. This is dull, it’s easy to put off, and it’s exactly how ex-staff end up reading company email for weeks. A short checklist, run every single time, is all it takes to close the gap.

Getting it set up

This is groundwork that’s quick to do properly at the start and a headache to fix once it’s a tangle. If your setup has drifted into shared logins and half-remembered passwords, it’s worth straightening out before it causes a problem rather than after one.

Our Business essentials service covers the user side: proper accounts on your domain, an admin login kept separate and reachable, access set by role, and a clean process for adding and removing people. It sits alongside the rest of the setup a business runs on. If yours could use a tidy-up, tell us how your team is set up and we’ll sort it.