E-mail privacy after transfer of domain

[Tony Walker]

Hi 

I am looking to rebrand our business and the domain I am seeking is already owned by someone else. The owner is not averse to selling it to me but he has a specfic email address of hisname@domain.co.nz. He only uses the domain now for emailing purposes but has a couple of sticking points he is concerned about.

We would be using the domain for our website, MS 365 office suite and associated email addresses. Whilst we have assured him that he can retain the email address now and into the future, with the additional proviso that if we ever decided to rebrand or similar we would gift the domain back to him, he still has concerns about the email privacy. 

We would be using office 365 and associated email addresses but his concern is that whilst he has no secrets, it is of concern that someone else in our business would administrate his email account. 

I know that we could allow him to set his own password but in the final analysis if we chose we could actually still access his emails. This alone has made the issue move into the 'too hard' basket and he is declining to sell.

He has offered the website services as he will not sue them but we need to move to the domain services for email and therein lies the problem

Does anyone have any bright ideas how he could be able to keep his email address through the domain but insulate it from the rest of the business? Any ideas would be welcome

thanks

[#2 · Accepted solution]

There's no way to guarantee that, you will be in total control of the domain and every address associated with it. While you can come up with some sort of forwarding solution (say a mail contact) to and external address and avoid his messages being stored in the confines of your tenant, and admin can potentially reverse that, or add a rule to create copies of all those messages and so forth.