Licensing company email to AI developers

Company email is the longest record most businesses have: years of threads with customers, suppliers and colleagues, showing how work was quoted, negotiated, delivered and fixed. Mode, Troveo and Mercor name email on their pages for companies, and micro1 lists internal communications. What buyers want is the working history, not the newsletters and notifications.

What is in it, and what to leave out

Most of a company mailbox is ordinary business correspondence that buyers de-identify before anything is passed on. Some of it needs a decision first:

• Threads with your lawyers. They may be privileged. Ask counsel before they go anywhere.
• HR and payroll mail: complaints, medical notes, salary discussions. Many companies exclude HR mailboxes entirely.
• Client material you hold under confidentiality, such as a law firm’s matter correspondence. See data licensing by industry.
• Passwords and keys pasted into email. Rotate them whatever you decide about licensing.

Buyers let you scope what goes in: Troveo says you decide what is in and what is out, and Mode buys an agreed, filtered copy. Our guide to privacy and de-identification explains what buyers remove.

Google Workspace: export before you cancel

Google says that after you cancel, users’ data is deleted and can’t be restored, so download it first; deletion can take up to 90 days, but do not count on that window.

The Data Export tool has conditions that catch people out:

• it needs an active subscription for core data;
• the super admin running it needs an account at least 30 days old with 2-Step Verification;
• the export is ready no earlier than 48 hours, typically 72, and can take up to 14 days;
• the export files are deleted 60 days after it starts.

Step by step: export Google Workspace before cancelling.

Microsoft 365: the stages after it ends

Microsoft describes three stages when a subscription is not renewed: Expired (30 days for most offers), Disabled (90 days, admins only) and Deleted, after which it cannot be reactivated. If you cancel, data left behind might be deleted after 90 days and will be deleted no later than 180 days after cancellation. Details: Microsoft 365 after the subscription ends.

Departed employees’ mailboxes

Every deleted user is history lost. Instead of deleting:

• Google: suspend or archive users rather than deleting them; a deleted user can be restored for up to 20 days.
• Microsoft: convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox, kept without a license up to 50 GB.

Older archives (PST files, former providers) are covered in old email archives. The data retention clock puts dates on each vendor’s deadlines from your cancellation day.