[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.