[ska]

The confusing thing for me here is why you would assume you would be able to receive any mail addressed to your old corporate address, in order to forward it. Or did I just misunderstand what you meant?

The corporation owns the email server, so their choice when you leave for whatever reason, is either to disable the account entirely (or give a bounce message) or keep it active.

Is your question really on the legality of the latter case, i.e. once you've left a company can they keep your email address live and perhaps even respond from it?

[scrollaway]

I never assumed that. To be clear, this was the employer refusing to close the email account / set up an out of office, the CEO just wanted all email redirected to them personally. Nobody said anything about me being able to continue using the email.

[ska]

Gotcha - it wasn't actually clear from the way you wrote it originally.

So in that case it is really jurisdictional. The US falls down pretty heavily on the corporate-owns-everything, but not everywhere does.

In my experience It's pretty common for companies to retain emails of people who have had outside contacts at least for a while, so nothing gets dropped on the floor, usually redirected to a supervisor or whomever took over the projects.