Google Workspace Email Forwarding for Past Employees: 4 Admin Methods (2026)

Note: If your company uses Google Workspace, you can do a lot more than just forward emails. Learn how Torii's Google Workspace integration lets you uncover shadow IT, automatically track SAML audit activity events, build custom workflows that automate dozens of actions (including onboarding, department transfers, and offboarding), and more. Learn more about Torii's powerful integration with Google Workspace.

When an employee leaves, the obvious cleanup steps both break their email. Delete the Google Workspace account and the address stops existing, so anything sent to it is lost. Suspend it and new mail is blocked, while Google keeps billing you for the seat.

Most admins want two things instead: messages from customers, prospects, and vendors should keep reaching a manager, and the company should still be able to reset passwords for business accounts that only that employee had access to. Google Workspace email forwarding gives you both, and you have four ways to set it up.

Which method should you use?

What happens to a departed employee’s email in Google Workspace

Before you pick a method, know what each account state does to incoming mail:

• Suspended: “New email and calendar invitations are blocked.” Suspended accounts are still charged at the same rate as active accounts on both the Annual and Flexible plans (Google: Suspend a user temporarily).
• Archived (Archived User license): archived users can’t receive new email and calendar invitations. You can assign a delegate, and senders get a notification telling them who to contact instead. That notification is not an automatic forward. Archived User licenses are available on Business Starter, Standard, and Plus; Enterprise Standard and Plus; and Education editions (Google: Archive former employee accounts).
• Deleted: Gmail messages and attachments are deleted with the account unless you migrate or export them first. A deleted account can be restored for up to 20 days, and 20 days after deletion the email address is removed from Google Workspace (Google: Delete or remove a user).

Save the mailbox first. When you delete a user, super admins can transfer Drive and Docs files, primary Calendar data, and Looker Studio (Data Studio) assets to another user, but Gmail is not part of that transfer. Export the mailbox with Google Vault or migrate it to another account before you delete. For the full click paths, see our guides on how to delete a user in Google Workspace, how to suspend a Google Workspace user, and how to archive a user with an Archived User license.

Method 1: Forward a deleted user’s email with an alias

This is Google’s own answer for forwarding email from a deleted user: to keep receiving messages sent to a former employee after the account is deleted, add their previous email address as an alias on a current user (Google: Add or delete an email alias). It costs nothing and frees the seat.

1. Delete the former employee’s account in the Google Admin console (admin.google.com). During deletion, transfer their Drive files and Calendar data to the manager.
2. Wait for the deletion to complete. Only one user can hold a given address or alias, so the old address has to be released first.
3. Go to Menu > Directory > Users and select the manager (or whoever takes over the mail).
4. Click Add Alternate Emails and enter the former employee’s address, for example tony@starkindustries.com.
5. Click Save.
6. Send a test message from an outside address to confirm it lands in the manager’s inbox.

Keep these limits in mind, all from Google’s email alias documentation and user deletion documentation:

• Each user can have up to 30 aliases at no extra cost.
• Alias changes can take up to 24 hours, though they typically happen faster.
• You have a 20-day window. After that, the deleted user’s address is removed from Google Workspace, so add the alias before then.

Transfer email to another user. If you want the old address itself to belong to someone else (not just forward), you can reassign it to another user within those 20 days. Reassignment may take up to 24 hours. This moves the address, not the old messages, so export the mailbox first. If you are consolidating several addresses onto one person, our guide to merging users and combining email aliases walks through it.

Method 2: Forward to several people with a Google Group

An alias delivers to one person. When a manager and IT both need the mail, or you want a shared inbox, use a Google Group. You keep the forwarding without keeping the original user account.

Step 1: Change the employee’s email address

1. Go to the Google Admin console (admin.google.com).
2. Find the departing user whose email you want to keep forwarding. In this example, we’ll use the employee named Tony Stark with the email address tony@starkindustries.com.
3. Change the employee’s email to the original address plus a prefix like _past_. For example, tony@starkindustries.com becomes _past_tony@starkindustries.com. Our guide on how to change a user’s email address in Google Workspace covers the full click path.
4. When you change an email address, Google Workspace automatically creates an alias with the original address. Delete the original alias tony@starkindustries.com so the address is free for the group.

Step 2: Create a group to catch all emails sent to the original address

1. In the Google Admin console, go to Groups. (See how to create a group in Google Workspace for the full click path.)
2. Create a new group with a name you can associate with the employee, for example Tony Stark Email FWD Group.
3. Set the group email to the departing employee’s original address: tony@starkindustries.com.
4. Enable External with Publish posts access. This lets the group receive email from people outside your organization, such as customers and vendors.

Step 3: Add the forward recipients

Once the group is created, add the people who should receive the emails sent to the former employee. In many cases, that’s the employee’s manager or someone from the IT department.

Step 4: Remove the old account

You can now suspend or delete the _past_tony@starkindustries.com account. Emails sent to tony@starkindustries.com go to the new group, and every member receives them. If you delete it, export the mailbox first, since Gmail data is deleted with the account.

Method 3: Redirect email with an admin routing rule (recipient address map)

Use a recipient address map when the account still exists: it’s suspended, or you’re mid-handover and haven’t decided what to do with it yet. This is how you forward email from a suspended user in Google Workspace without anyone signing in to the mailbox. To set it up, per Google’s routing documentation:

1. In the Admin console, go to Menu > Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail > Routing.
2. Select the top-level organizational unit.
3. Next to Email forwarding using recipient address map, click Configure.
4. Name the map, then click Add. Enter the former employee’s address under Address and the destination under Map to address. Use Bulk Add if you’re mapping many addresses.
5. Choose which messages the map applies to: All incoming messages or Only external incoming messages.
6. Optional: check Also route to original destination if the original mailbox should still get a copy, and Add X-Gm-Original-To header to stamp each forwarded message with the address it was originally sent to.
7. Click Save.

Forwarded messages appear to come directly from the original sender, so the manager can reply to the customer as normal. The same Google page notes a maximum of 5,000 recipient addresses across all address maps, and changes can take up to 24 hours.

Google’s documentation doesn’t say whether address maps deliver mail for suspended accounts. Admins commonly use them while an account is suspended, but send a test message from an outside address and confirm delivery before you rely on it.

One caveat: a suspended account still costs a full seat (Google: Suspend a user). Treat the routing rule as a transition step, then move to an alias or group and delete the account.

Method 4: Set up Gmail forwarding from the user’s own settings

Employee Gmail auto forwarding is the simplest option, but it only works while the account is active and someone can sign in to it. That makes it right for a notice period or a leave of absence, not for after the employee is gone.

1. In Gmail, click the gear icon, then See all settings.
2. Open the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
3. Click Add a forwarding address and enter the destination address.
4. Confirm using the verification link sent to that address.
5. Back in settings, choose what happens to Gmail’s copy of forwarded messages (keep, mark as read, archive, or delete).
6. Click Save Changes.

If the forwarding option is missing, your admin has turned off automatic forwarding (see below).

How to control and track employee email auto-forwarding

Self-service forwarding is convenient, but it’s also a data-loss risk. An employee who sets up auto-forwarding to a personal account in the weeks before leaving can take customer conversations and internal documents with them. Google Workspace gives admins controls for this (Google: Let users automatically forward their Gmail):

• Turn it off or limit it. Go to Menu > Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail > End User Access. “Allow users to automatically forward incoming email” is on by default. Uncheck it, or limit forwarding to internal addresses only. When it’s off, the forwarding option isn’t available in users’ Gmail settings.
• Track forwarded mail. Per Google, “To check messages forwarded by people in your organization, use Email Log Search.”
• Audit and alert. Review Gmail log events in the audit and investigation tool (Reporting > Audit and investigation), and set alert rules in Security > Alert center so you’re notified when users change forwarding settings.

A note on monitoring employee email. Email Log Search shows admins message metadata, not message content. To search and export message content for legal or compliance reasons, use Google Vault, which is included only in some Google Workspace editions.

Tips for forwarding former employees’ email

• Keep consistent naming conventions. For example, use the email prefix _past_ for former employee accounts and name groups <Employee Name> Email FWD Group.
• Don’t reuse old email addresses for new employees. The new hire starts receiving mail meant for the former employee, and the forwarding setup breaks.
• Set a review date for every forward. Mail to a former employee usually tapers off. Put a date on the calendar to check whether each alias, group, or routing rule is still needed, and remove the ones that aren’t.
• Document who receives each former employee’s mail. Record the address, the method, and the recipient in your offboarding records so the next admin isn’t guessing.

Make email forwarding part of offboarding

When an employee leaves, their email is only one of many things to handle. How many applications did they adopt (including Shadow IT)? What shared passwords did they use? What company credit cards did they use?

If you’re not sure where to start, our offboarding checklist walks through the steps. And if you want better insight into your entire SaaS stack, check out Torii, a leading SaaS Management Platform. Torii workflows can run these Google Workspace offboarding steps automatically the moment a user’s status changes. See our post on real-time offboarding for Okta and Google Workspace and the Torii Google Workspace integration page for details.

If your organization uses Google Workspace, you’ve only scratched the surface. Learn more about Torii’s powerful Google Workspace integration, which gives you full visibility into your SaaS ecosystem and lets you automate employee and app lifecycle tasks so they run quickly and consistently every time.

See Torii’s Google Workspace integration in action. Book a demo.