For physicians · independent alumni site

Your alumni email is probably on your licensing record

Duke switches off @alumni.duke.edu on January 31, 2027. If you are a physician who has used that address since residency, the problem is not that you lose an inbox. It is that a dozen records naming you have an address on them that stops working, and every one of those senders sends once.

A recertification notice, a credentialing query, a licensing board confirming your address of record, a journal running a correction on a paper with your name on it — none of them retries, and none of them tells you it failed. You are not the sender, so you never see the bounce. The first sign is usually a consequence rather than a message.

The records worth checking, in order

1. Your state licensing board

Most states run their own portal and most let you change the address of record online. Two things worth knowing: many states require notification of a change within a set window — 30 days is common — and in most states the address of record is a public record. Some boards use it for renewal notices, which is the correspondence you least want silently failing.

2. Your specialty board

There is no central ABMS account. Each certifying board runs its own portal, so if you hold more than one certification that is more than one change. ABIM’s is at portal.abim.org/profile. Longitudinal assessment reminders and MOC deadlines route through whatever address is on that profile.

3. NPPES — and there are two addresses

This one catches people. The email you sign in with lives in the CMS I&A system, and the contact email inside the NPI record itself is a different field. Changing one does not change the other, and the NPI record is what payers and credentialing services read. nppes.cms.hhs.gov

4. DEA registration — do this one first

The online tool handles name and address changes, but an email change generally requires the Registration Service Center on 1-800-882-9539. That makes it a phone call rather than a form, which in practice means it is the one people leave until it is urgent.

5. Malpractice carrier and hospital credentialing

Both send correspondence you cannot afford to miss and neither is self-service in most cases. Credentialing offices in particular tend to hold whatever address was on the original application, which for many physicians is the one from training.

6. MyChart, once per health system

Each organisation runs its own MyChart with its own settings. If you are a patient at three health systems, that is three separate changes.

The two that may have no replacement at all

Everything else

The rest — brokerage, credit bureaus, domain registrars, password managers, journals and publishers — is on the general checklist, ordered so that the accounts you cannot fix afterwards come first.

The full checklist: 52 accounts, in order →

Why this is happening, briefly

Forwarded mail began failing authentication when Google and Yahoo started requiring it in February 2024 and Microsoft began rejecting under-authenticated mail in May 2025. That part of Duke’s explanation is true. Fifteen peer universities hit the same change in the same window and twelve kept the address — some by moving alumni to real mailboxes, some by repairing the forwarding. What each university did →

If your address is attached to a licensing record or published work, that is precisely the cost Duke has not accounted for publicly, and there is a count of affected alumni that says so. Add yourself →

Written by a Duke alum. This is an independent site, not affiliated with or endorsed by Duke University, and nothing here is legal or professional advice — verify every requirement against your own board and registry, since the rules differ by state and by certifying body.