Tracking down and fully removing user from organisation.

Question

Hi,

Bit of a strange one wondering if anyone else has had the same problem...

We removed a user a few years ago when he left the organisation, he was admin on ArcGIS online, however recently we have been getting undeliverable mail notifications for him sporadically over the past 6 months or so, possibly as that's IT just deactivated his email account!

He has been removed as a user and I cant find any listing of him in ArcGIS online or in myESRI, anywhere else I can look as I want to ensure that when we remove a user they still don't have access to our locked content.

Thanks

Sarah

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marvin.davis · Answer

Sarah,

Emails are a wacky thing. Our org gets around 10 copies of ArcNews and ArcUser, and all but 2 are to employees no longer here. Emails, I imagine, are similar. One possibility is to ensure "Disable Esri Access" is selected on the user account BEFORE you remove them from the org.

When in doubt, contact your account manager and tell them to clean up the mailing list?

Marvin

jcarlson · Answer

When you remove an AGOL user from your organization, all you're really doing is disconnecting them from the org. The user account persists, but is downgraded to a public account. The details of the account will not change.

In the event that the user was supposed to receive a notification in AGOL to their public account, that notification would still go to their listed email. I'm guessing this person didn't do anything to take control of their downgraded account and update the email address in their profile.

To see if this user is still out there, you can try a couple of things:

Go to https://www.arcgis.com/home/user.html?user=[the-username] and see if they're still there, and what, if any, details are publicly available.

Alternatively, use the ArcGIS Python API (an AGOL Notebook works great for this) to do a user search. Note: the email property doesn't appear in dir(User), but can be accessed if the user is truly in your organization.

for u in gis.users.search('josh carlson', outside_org=True):
    try:
        email = u.email
    except:
        email = 'n/a'
    print(f'{u.username:20}{email}')

Returns:

carlsonj9           jcarlson@co.kendall.il.us
cj6046              n/a
cj6046esri          n/a
cj6046work          n/a
...

That said, if you can see their old username but cannot access any properties of the User object, that's as much proof as any that they're not in the org anymore.