MIT runs alumni email as a full mailbox

Kept the address

@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.

What happened

@alum.mit.edu is a full Outlook mailbox, not a forwarder. MIT markets it as Email for Life. Forwarding is available but optional — which is the architectural point: when the mailbox is the primary thing, the forwarding hop is a convenience rather than the whole service, and its failure is not existential.

A caveat this site cannot resolve

MIT publishes a page titled “Alumni Email Retention Change — FAQs.” Every URL on that domain returns 403 to this site's tooling, so it has not been read.

The mailbox itself is confirmed from MIT's own support documentation, which is why the row stands. But nothing here claims permanence, because MIT has announced a retention change of unknown scope. If you can read that page and it changes the picture, the correction address is on the contact page.

How this bears on the question

MIT is the example of a university that never had the forwarding problem in the first place, because it never built the service as a forwarder. 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 MIT 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If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us — a correction is more useful than being right by default.