Ohio State ended alumni email and deleted the accounts

What happened

Ohio State ended alumni email forwarding on December 31, 2024. Three months later, on April 1, 2025, it deleted the BuckeyeMail for Life accounts themselves. OSU's own documentation states the data was unrecoverable.

That second step is what separates Ohio State from almost every other university in this comparison. Ending a forwarding service means mail stops arriving. Deleting the account means whatever was in it is gone, and there is no version of asking nicely afterwards that gets it back.

The stated reasons

OSU led on deliverability: third-party providers blocking or spam-filing forwarded mail. Then licensing and security requirements. Then a judgement that the service “no longer fully meets the needs of our stakeholders.”

Alumni were pointed to a list of commercial email providers.

The deliverability reasoning is sound and is not disputed here. Forwarding breaks SPF alignment, and enforcement genuinely tightened during this period. The question this site asks of every university, Ohio State included, is not whether the problem was real but why the answer was termination when twelve peers facing the same problem answered differently.

What was not published

How many alumni held the address. What each alternative would have cost. Which alternatives were evaluated, and why each was rejected. What proportion of forwarded alumni mail was actually failing.

That last one is worth dwelling on, because it is missing everywhere. A university ending a service on delivery grounds is in a position to measure the delivery failure rate, and no university in this comparison has published one. Ohio State is a public institution, so those figures are reachable by public records request in a way they are not at a private university.