My mother (civilian MOD employee working at an "airbase" which was in fact just a lot of office buildings, no airfield, although it did have machine guns and a nuclear bunker unlike most office parks) used to have an email address which basically said what her job was [I don't remember the exact address, something involving REG twice because she worked for the REGistry of the RAF's REGiment], and yup, the day after she retired that address still worked it just dropped in somebody else's lap.

So many IT outfits have problems that come back to "Oh, that was going to Bob and Bob left" and it infuriates me every time I see it, because we've known for decades how to avoid this problem.

What’s odd is that the MOD does that and the rest of the civil service carries on using name-based emails, despite people moving round every year or two.

There is a huge problem in the civil service of information being local to teams. Important information sots in inboxes or a shared drive if you’re lucky.

Finding out who to contact in another department on a given topic can take days and usually requires asking your private office to check (because they at least have the other department’s private office contact details). Otherwise people just look for emails in published documents and email out in the hope that at least one of them still works in the right department.

This could all be so easily solved with permanent, shared mailboxes per team. I suspect the reluctance is in part due to how much easier it would make FOIs.

Well then you need at least two email addresses per person. One role-based, one personal - promotions happen, you may want to keep being able to contact the human, not the role.

Yes, you do. But for the military this does not really matter, one of their defining characteristics is that they care MUCH more about "getting the job done" than about cost. This leads both to massive inefficiencies and to their extreme resilience to "bus factor" type events. It's a decent tradeoff for the military, it probably wouldn't be for commercial entities.

Having a role based system also makes it easier to move those tasks into a ticketing system.