Can a terminated user's email ID be allocated to new resource ?

[Gopi22]

Hi, 

We have a requirement in our project, where an old email ID (of a terminated user) to be allocated to a new user onboarded. 

For example, we had a user with name - Jack Jameson with email id 'Jack.Jameson@company.com'. This user has been terminated 2 years back. 
Now, we have a new user onboarded to the company with same name - Jack Jameson. Since the email address 'Jack.Jameson@company.com' is removed from our employee source of truth, which is Azure AD, same email address was allocated to the new user in Azure AD. However, in ServiceNow, the old email address was not removed from the deactivated user profile and hence due to unique constraint issue, it restricted the allocation of same email address to new user profile. 

I want to understand, what are the challenges, if we re-use the same email address in ServiceNow? 

Thanks,

Gopi

[Sandeep Rajput]

@Gopi22 I don't see any major challenges as long as the password of the previous account has been reset and the details of the previous employee have been omitted from your ServiceNow instance. If you do not wish to do this and still want to use the email assigned to previous employee in ServiceNow then I recommend updating the user id (user_name) and email of the previous employee. Once done, you will be able to use the email of the previous employee for the new employee in ServiceNow.

[Gopi22]

Hi Sandeep,

One impact I see is that the past tickets created - like Incidents, Requests, etc., are having the 'Created by' field updated with the 'Jack.Jameson@company.com' email address. This will be confusing if we draw reports from ServiceNow.

Thanks,

Gopi

[Sandeep Rajput]

@Gopi22 Organisations usually follow an archiving policy according to which all the employee data (e.g. incident, requests, cases etc.) gets archived the moment an employee leaves the organisation.  In case if no such policy exist within your company then you can plan to do a clean up of the data which is related to the previous user and then assign the email id to the new user.

Please mark my response an accepted solution if it manages to address your question.

[Gopi22]

Hi Sandeep,
Thank you for your inputs. 

Cleaning up or updating the past records is not a right approach for us (or any organization I believe) because the data is important for auditing purpose or when you want to pull a report from any table, say "need incident records created in a particular category for the past 4 years" etc.,

Thanks,

Gopi