HOA and Strata Mailbox Handover: Change the Committee Without Losing the Archive

Every annual meeting reshuffles the committee

A volunteer condo board, HOA board or strata committee is not a stable team. Members serve a term, then step down or sell their unit. In New South Wales the owners corporation elects a new strata committee at each annual general meeting. In a US association, directors reach the end of their terms, burn out, or sell and move. Either way, most years bring a departure or two, and with luck a new owner willing to take a seat.

The scale is easy to underestimate. The Foundation for Community Association Research counts about 2,555,000 elected board members and appointed committee members across U.S. community associations in 2025. Every one of those seats changes hands sooner or later.

Meanwhile the building’s mailbox keeps working. The roofer sends a quote. The insurance assessor asks for photos of the water damage. The lawyer needs a signed resolution. An owner reports a leak in the stairwell. All of it lands at one address, often a Gmail account created years ago by someone who left the building long since. We described what flows through that address in the shared mailbox for self-managed HOAs and strata committees.

The handover of that mailbox is rarely planned. The outgoing secretary emails the password to the new one, forwards three threads that felt important, and moves on. Six months later, nobody can say where last year’s insurance claim stands.

Treat the mailbox as part of the building’s records

Handover duties usually exist for documents: minutes, contracts, financial statements, the strata roll or owner list. The mailbox rarely makes that list, yet it holds the live version of every open file: what the assessor actually wrote, what the contractor actually promised, and when. In NSW, the government’s own description of the strata committee secretary’s role lists correspondence alongside agendas, minutes and notices. The job is named; the handover of the inbox that carries it usually is not.

Some countries spell out the handover itself. In France, where a volunteer co-owner can be the building’s syndic and its legal representative, an outgoing syndic, volunteer or professional, is legally required to hand over the cash position within 15 days, then the building’s full documents and archives within a month, with an itemized inventory, and the digital items must be in a format that can be downloaded and printed. You do not need a statute to copy the idea: a written inventory, a fixed handover date, and nothing that depends on the goodwill or the memory of the person leaving.

Inventory the open topics before anyone leaves

Before a member steps down, list what is open. Not the whole history: only the files where someone is waiting for an answer or an action.

• Open insurance claims: claim number, last exchange with the assessor or adjuster, documents still owed.
• Pending contractor quotes: who was chased and when, what goes to the next meeting for a vote.
• Threads with the lawyer, the bank, the council or a strata manager: who must answer, and by when.
• Levy and dues reminders in progress: who was reminded, when, with what result.

One line per file is enough: where it stands, who replied last, what you are waiting for and from whom. It takes an hour and saves the next committee months of reconstruction.

Hand over the account, not just the password

A password is only half of what someone holds. The other half is the account’s recovery options: the phone number and backup email the provider uses to let someone back in when they can no longer sign in. If those still belong to the member who created the account, they can recover it and the committee cannot.

Move the recovery phone and email to a member who is staying, record where the account lives, and, if the address sits on the building’s own domain, note who holds the hosting account and when the domain renews. Then change the password, once, if it was ever shared. On a Google account, do the recovery part a week before handover day rather than on the day: after a change, Google may keep sending codes to the previous recovery details for 7 days.

When a strata manager or management company takes over

A building that stops self-managing faces a bigger version of the same handover. The manager works from its own systems and its own email, so the building’s address is no longer where the day-to-day happens. It does not stop mattering, though.

• Keep its contents. For a Gmail account, Google’s download tool exports the account’s email, as long as you are signed in to the account.
• Tell correspondents where to write. An automatic reply pointing to the manager stops a quote or a claim update from landing for months in a mailbox nobody reads.
• Consider keeping it as the committee’s address. The committee still exists, still needs one address to deal with the manager, and everyone already knows this one. Move its recovery options to a committee member.

Revoke access person by person

If the committee shares one password, every departure forces a bad choice. Change the password and redistribute it: in practice nobody does, because it is tedious and the person left on good terms. Change nothing: a former member keeps reading owners’ mail, sometimes for years. Neither option is healthy.

The sound setup is one login per person, revocable individually. On Gmail, delegation does this natively: each member reads and replies from their own account, without knowing the password, and a delegate can be removed in the settings without touching anyone else. Many building mailboxes are not on Gmail though: they sit at an internet provider or a web host, on plain IMAP, where nothing comparable exists. We compared the options in share a mailbox without sharing the password.

Forwarding to personal mailboxes destroys the archive

The tempting shortcut comes up at every handover: auto-forward the building’s address to each member’s personal mailbox. Everyone gets everything at home, no extra login. Three problems follow, one of them irreversible.

First, automatic forwarding only touches new mail. Gmail’s own documentation says it forwards “all new messages”: the history is not part of it, and it stays at the original address, which nobody opens anymore.

Second, replies leave from personal addresses. The roofer answers john.smith@ directly, and that thread never returns to the building’s address. The archive fragments across four personal mailboxes.

Third, at the first departure, the slice of the archive living in the leaver’s personal box leaves with them. The next committee inherits a hollow address and gutted files. It is the exact opposite of the continuity you wanted.

Bring new members into the history

A new committee member does not start from zero if the mailbox is the shared memory. Their first weeks should mostly be reading: the open claim, the quotes compared last spring, the tone used with the contractor who underdelivered.

Give them access under their own name on handover day. Walk through the inventory of open files together. Show them where the recurring topics live. It is shorter than a handover meeting, and it stays available when they have forgotten half of what they were told.

A six-step handover

1. Check who holds the account and its recovery options, and move them to someone who is staying.
2. Close the finished conversations, so the mailbox only shows what is alive.
3. Write the inventory of open files, one line each.
4. Reassign every open file to a member who stays or arrives.
5. Add a short internal note to sensitive files: the dispute with the contractor, the owner in arrears.
6. On the effective date, revoke the leavers’ access and create the newcomers’.

A mailbox that outlives the term

With a shared inbox like Trupeo, this routine is part of daily work instead of being rebuilt at every annual meeting. You connect the building’s existing address: Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365, or any IMAP mailbox, which covers the addresses that came with an internet provider or a domain. Each committee or board member signs in with their own login.

Files already have the shape a handover requires: one owner per conversation, a to-handle or done status, internal notes owners never see. Handover shrinks to three moves: reassign the open files, remove one access, create another. The history and the notes stay with the building. Step one still needs doing in every case: Trupeo does not change who owns the email account itself. And if the mailbox password changes along the way, reconnect the mailbox in Trupeo straight away: an IMAP mailbox is connected with the old password, and Google cuts off an app’s Gmail access when the account password changes. Until someone reconnects it, new mail stops arriving in Trupeo.

The same logic applies to any structure run by volunteers: we described it for non-profits in volunteer email handover. And if you want a number, it fits in one line: €10 a month excluding VAT for a mailbox shared by two people, €20 from three people up, however large the committee. The details are on our page for strata committees and HOA boards. What a committee of 7 or 10 would pay with a tool that charges per user is worked out in shared inbox pricing, per user or per mailbox.

Frequently asked questions

What should an outgoing HOA or strata committee member hand over?

The inventory of open files, one line each, and whatever they hold of the mailbox itself: the password if it was shared, and the recovery phone or email if they created the account. Their access should be removed on the date they leave, not months later.

Should we change the mailbox password when a member leaves?

If the password was shared, yes, and then every remaining member needs the new one. That churn is the reason to give each member their own access instead, through Gmail delegation or a shared inbox, so a departure only means removing one person.

What happens to the building’s email when a strata manager takes over?

The manager uses its own systems, but the building’s address still holds years of correspondence and is still the one contractors and owners know. Export its contents, set an automatic reply pointing to the manager, and consider keeping it as the committee’s own address.

Can we recover emails that were forwarded to former members’ personal mailboxes?

Partly. Incoming messages stayed in the original mailbox if forwarding was set to keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox, as Google recommends, or to archive it. If it was set to move the copy to the trash, Gmail deleted each message for good after 30 days, so only the last month can still be found. Replies sent from personal mailboxes never passed through the shared address, and only the former members can send them back.

---

Sources:

• 2025 U.S. National and State Statistical Review (Foundation for Community Association Research): about 2,555,000 elected board members and appointed committee members in U.S. community associations in 2025.
• Who’s who in strata (NSW Government): the owners corporation elects the strata committee at each AGM, and the secretary’s role includes other administration including correspondence.
• Syndic de copropriété (Service-Public.fr, in French): a non-professional syndic must be a co-owner of the building, and is the legal representative of the syndicat des copropriétaires.
• En cas de changement de syndic, que deviennent les documents de la copropriété ? (Service-Public.fr, in French): the French legal deadlines, set for any outgoing syndic, for handing a building’s documents and archives to the next one, with an itemized inventory, and the downloadable and printable format required for items sent digitally.
• How to download your Google data (Google Account Help): exporting a Google Account’s data, email included, while signed in to the account.
• Automatically forward Gmail messages to another account (Gmail Help): Gmail forwards “all new messages” except spam; the page describes two settings for Gmail’s copy, saving it in the inbox or archiving it, and recommends keeping it in the inbox.
• AutoForwarding (Gmail API, Google for Developers): the four things Gmail can do with its copy of a forwarded message: leave it in the inbox, archive it, move it to the trash, or leave it in the inbox marked as read.
• Delete messages in Gmail (Gmail Help): a message in the trash is permanently deleted after 30 days.
• Delegate & collaborate on email (Gmail Help): delegated access without password sharing, and removing a delegate from the settings.
• Set up recovery options (Google Account Help): a Google Account’s recovery phone and email, which help you get back into the account when you cannot sign in, and the 7 days during which Google may keep sending codes to previous recovery info after a change.
• Using OAuth 2.0 to Access Google APIs (Google for Developers): an app’s refresh token stops working when the user changes their password and the token contains Gmail scopes.