Steps to take in CRM when an employee leaves the organisation

Steps to take in CRM when an employee leaves the organisation

When an employee leaves the business, you wish to retain all the details of the email trail between your contacts and this employee. Therefore - before deactivating the employee in your system, change the email integration setup from IMAP to POP. You may need assistance of your mail administrator with this.

What do you need?
  1. login to Zoho CRM as the employee that is leaving (the administrator may need to reset the password and/or multi-factor authentication to allow you access)
  2. access details to the mailbox of the employee that is leaving (the administrator may need to reset the password and/or one-time password (in case of multi-factor authentication) to allow you access)
  3. an active POP enabled mailbox associated with the employee that is leaving
In CRM, log in as the employee that is leaving the organisation. Go to Settings, and under Channels, select Email.
Remove the current IMAP integration. Then recreate the email integration using the POP protocol, and share the emails publicly (do not forget to exclude your own domain in the domain exclusions).

Once the POP account integration is set up for the user in CRM, navigate to the Security Control settings (you need to be an administrator to do this), go to the Zoho Mail Addon Users tab, and navigate to the account of the employee that left the business. Initiate a backup of all the emails for that user (this is only available for users with a POP based email integration.

You have maximum 5GB of mail storage per POP mail-box. It is a good practice to archive or delete older emails from the mail server before initiating the POP transfer.

The difference between IMAP and POP in terms of email access is that IMAP leaves the messages on your email server. In order for emails to show up in your system with IMAP, both the mailbox in your mailserver, and the user needs to be active in CRM. This consumes a licence in both applications. With the POP mail protocol, the emails are copied from your email server to Zoho CRM. Once this is done, you can deactivate the user in your email server, and save a licence.


Once this is done, you can start the deactivation process for this user in the CRM/Zoho One system.


In CRM- go to Users - select the user in question, and select delete and transfer. See: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/articles/crm-delete-transfer-users
In Zoho One - go to Admin Panel - and deactivate the user. See: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/articles/zohoone-deactivate-activate-users#Deactivate_a_user