Reference · last checked September 3, 2026
Which universities have ended alumni email
Forwarded mail began failing authentication for everyone in the same window: Google and Yahoo started requiring it from bulk senders on February 1, 2024, and Microsoft began rejecting under-authenticated mail outright on May 5, 2025. Every university below hit that change. They did not reach the same conclusion.
| University | Outcome | What they did |
|---|---|---|
| PurdueAdded Sep 2026purduebrokenpromises.com ↗ | Scheduled | @alumni.purdue.edu is scheduled for decommissioning on November 1, 2026, nine weeks before Duke's date. Purdue's own News Service headlined the 2003 announcement “Purdue to provide lifetime e-mail addresses to alumni.” Unlike Duke, Purdue has published no reason for ending it. |
| Princeton | Kept | Ended plain forwarding but gave alumni a free Google Workspace mailbox, so the @alumni.princeton.edu address survives. From February 2026 the Class of 2026 onward are not offered forwarding. |
| Yale | Kept | Replaced forwarding with YaleMail — free Google mailboxes on @aya.yale.edu, capped at 5 GB. |
| Penn | Kept | Moved alumni onto Quaker Gmail at @alumni.upenn.edu; Wharton still runs a separate alumni forwarding address of its own. |
| Stanford | Kept | Free @alumni.stanford.edu mailbox for anyone enrolled three quarters or more. No membership fee, though Stanford's terms reserve the right to end the service. |
| MIT | Kept | @alum.mit.edu is a full Outlook mailbox, marketed by MIT as Email for Life; forwarding is optional. MIT has published a retention change we have not been able to read. |
| Notre Dame | Kept | @alumni.nd.edu Google account on request. Once a graduate has one, mail to the expired @nd.edu address forwards to it automatically. |
| Michigan | Kept | Retained @umich.edu forwarding for alumni at no charge, alongside U-M Google accounts. |
| Dartmouth | Kept | Lifetime forwarding retained, with plain terms stating delivery can't be fully guaranteed. |
| Cornell | Kept | Kept alumni Google accounts but capped storage at 5 GB. Accounts left over quota are deleted along with their contents, so the address survives but the mail in it may not. |
| Harvard | Reversed | Announced deactivation in September 2022 and reversed it on October 27, after a petition reached about 2,800 signatures. Still forwards @post.harvard.edu and @alumni.harvard.edu through an outside vendor. |
| Virginia Tech | Kept | Announced in April 2023 that Google's licensing change would move alumni from @vt.edu to @alumni.vt.edu. When the changes finished in November 2024, alumni had kept @vt.edu on Gmail with 5 GB; the other Google services ended. |
| Ohio State | Ended | Ended forwarding Dec 31, 2024 and deleted BuckeyeMail for Life accounts on Apr 1, 2025, data unrecoverable. Cited blocked forwarded mail, licensing and security requirements, and declining fit. Pointed alumni to a list of commercial providers. |
| Columbia | Kept | Discontinued auto-forwarding to outside domains on Feb 4, 2025, citing authentication failures. Alumni keep the LionMail account itself — CUIT states it will not expire — with a 5 GB quota, and the alumni association offers @caa.columbia.edu. Medical-school graduates are handled separately. |
| CU Boulder | Deferred | Announced termination for Aug 31, 2026. Rex Boge, a 2020 and 2023 graduate, filed a breach-of-contract class action in Denver County District Court on June 15, 2026; CU settled, he dropped the suit, and access now runs through at least Aug 31, 2027 while CU reassesses. The extension is opt-in and gated on activity: only alumni who actually used the account between Aug 31, 2025 and Aug 31, 2026 are eligible, and they had to opt in by that second date. Everyone else lost the address on the original schedule. See the litigation section below. |
| Temple | Ended | Closed alumni accounts between January and May 7, 2025, citing cybersecurity risk, sector practice and usage rates. In 2022, during its migration from Google to Microsoft, it altered the account agreement so alumni updating a password had to accept terms surrendering lifetime access. Russell Bryant sued for breach of contract in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas in December 2024; his bid to bring it as a class action was denied and nothing has been reported since. Accounts now expire one year after graduation. |
| Duke | Scheduled | Shutting the service off on January 31, 2027, moved once already from July 31, 2026. Duke has announced no replacement address service. |
How to read the labels
Kept
Alumni still have a working address at the university. This covers several different fixes — a hosted mailbox on Google or Microsoft, repaired forwarding using ARC and SRS, or forwarding switched off outbound while the mailbox itself stayed. Columbia is the case most often miscounted: it ended automatic forwarding to outside domains and kept the mailbox, which its IT office says will not expire.
Reversed
Announced a termination and then withdrew it. Harvard is the only clean example: announced September 2022, reversed October 27 that year after a petition reached about 2,800 signatures.
Deferred
A shutdown postponed but not cancelled. Colorado Boulder settled a breach-of-contract class action and extended access through at least August 31, 2027 — but only for alumni who had actually used the account in the preceding year and who opted in by the original deadline. Everyone else lost it on schedule.
Ended and Scheduled
Ended means alumni have already lost the address. Scheduled means a date has been set and has not yet arrived — which as of this writing is Duke alone, on January 31, 2027.
Corrections. Each row was re-verified against the university’s own IT pages on August 30 and September 3, 2026. Three rows changed in that pass: Columbia moved out of the termination column, Virginia Tech out of “reversed” (it never terminated), and Colorado from “reversed” to “deferred”. MIT has published an alumni email retention change we have not been able to read, and its row is worded to claim nothing about permanence as a result. If a row is wrong, tell us and it gets corrected with a note.
Not a Duke alum? If your university ended, changed or kept its alumni email and it is not on this table — or a row here is out of date — tell us what happened and it gets added with a source. Ohio State and Temple alumni have already lost the address; Kansas, Vanderbilt and Wright State alumni are living through a version of the same thing. As far as we can tell this is the only public record of which schools did what, which is itself part of the problem: each set of alumni has been told it is a local technical decision, and none of them has been shown the other fourteen. A sibling campaign keeps the same kind of record for Purdue at purduebrokenpromises.com, where the alumni address ends on November 1, 2026.
Free to cite, quote or reproduce with a link. Maintained by an independent campaign of Duke alumni, unaffiliated with Duke University, which is documenting Duke’s own decision at dukebrokenpromises.com and the 2007 page in which Duke called the address a “free lifetime forwarding email address” at /evidence.