CU Boulder was sued over Email for Life — and extended it

Deferred — unresolved

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.

What happened

CU Boulder announced that Email for Life would end on August 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. The theory was that alumni had given consideration for the promise: a mandatory Student Computing Fee of $67.24 per semester, paid against a program CU launched in 2005 and called Email for Life.

CU settled. Boge and his lawyers filed a voluntary dismissal without prejudice — they dropped the case and kept the right to bring it again. His lawyer declined to comment on the reasons. Nothing was decided on the merits.

The dismissal and the extension were reported on August 11, 2026: eight weeks after the complaint was filed, and three weeks before access had been due to end.

Read the extension precisely

CU's IT office states that following the settlement it is offering extended access through at least August 31, 2027 “while we assess the long-term viability of the offering.”

That is narrower than the headlines suggested, and it matters. The extension is opt-in and it is gated on activity. An alum qualifies only if they accessed and actively used the account between August 31, 2025 and August 31, 2026 — and they then had to opt in by 11:59 p.m. MDT on August 31, 2026, supply a personal address, and move the mail they wanted to keep.

Anyone who did not clear both hurdles lost access on the original date, and CU says it cannot recover the mail afterwards. What the settlement bought is a year and a reopened decision for the alumni who took the step — not a blanket reprieve for all 320,000.

The usage argument

CU justified termination partly on usage, saying only 7.5% of its roughly 320,000 living alumni logged in during 2025.

That figure does not transfer to a forwarding service. A forwarding address has no mailbox and nothing to log into, so mail can pass through it every day of the year while the login count stays at zero. Whatever the right measure of use is for a forwarder, it is not that one.

How this bears on the question

CU Boulder is the only university in this comparison where litigation reopened the decision. It is also the only one whose outcome remains genuinely unresolved, which is why it is not counted in the twelve that kept the address. 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 CU Boulder 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.