Columbia ended forwarding but kept the mailbox

Kept the address

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.

What happened

Columbia discontinued auto-forwarding to outside domains on February 4, 2025, citing authentication failures.

But alumni keep the LionMail account itself. Columbia University Information Technology states that it will not expire. The quota is 5 GB, and the alumni association separately offers @caa.columbia.edu. Medical-school graduates are handled under a different arrangement.

A correction this site had to make

Columbia was originally listed here in the termination column. That was wrong, and it was corrected publicly on August 30, 2026.

The error came from reading “discontinued forwarding” as “ended alumni email.” They are not the same thing, and the difference is exactly the point Columbia's approach illustrates: the forwarding hop is what broke under DMARC enforcement, and removing the hop while keeping the mailbox solves the technical problem without taking the address away.

This correction is recorded rather than quietly fixed because a site arguing that a university should be held to what it published cannot hold itself to a lower standard.

How this bears on the question

Columbia is the clearest demonstration that “forwarding is broken” and “the address must end” are separate propositions. It solved the first without conceding the second. Duke switches off @alumni.duke.edu on January 31, 2027, and has announced no replacement address service.

Sources and further reading

This page is part of an independent record of university alumni email terminations, maintained by a Duke alum. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Columbia or Duke University. Every row is sourced to the university’s own documentation where one exists, and this record has been corrected in public three times.

If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us — a correction is more useful than being right by default.