HI Derek,
My guess is that you'll run into other areas where a duplicated email address will give you problems. Off hand I can think of conflicts in the email system with the new employee able to access the old employee's emails, the new person getting email intended for the old person, etc. So...to solve the problem and not the symptom I suggest assigning a different email address to the new employee to avoid conflicts.
In Confluence and other Atlassian products, the email address is a unique identifier, so even if you were to deactivate the old account the new user would end up reactivating it because of the duplicated identifier. Even a site-admin can't change the email address for a user through the front door once it's been created.
I can think of two ways to correct this:
1) Give the new user a different email address. In the long run, this is probably the cleanest way since it would also correct any conflicts outside of Confluence.
2) If you are on the Server version you may be able to access the database from outside of the program and use a script to modify the old user's email address. that would eliminate the duplication in Confluence and allow you to create the new account as a separate entity. I'm not sure if you'd be able to do this in the Cloud version.
To be thorough, I'll also say you can delete the user account rather than deactivate it and recreate it with the new user. You will probably also need to remove the old user from any documents and comments they had made. Note...I don't recommend this, you'll lose all of your history from that old account and there is a good chance you'll miss something, which would cause problems down the road.
Hope this helps,
-Scott
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