Independent alumni campaign
Purdue promised this address for a lifetime, in a headline. Be counted in the number Purdue won’t publish. No name required. On October 2, 2003 Purdue’s own News Service announced “lifetime e-mail addresses to alumni”; on November 1, 2026 the service is switched off, and Purdue has published no reason for it. This page collects what that costs the people who believed the promise.
Losing the address? What to change, and in what order →
The receipt
“Purdue to provide lifetime e-mail addresses to alumni”
Purdue News Service headline · October 2, 2003
That is not a paraphrase and it is not an alumni magazine's flourish. It is the headline Purdue's own News Service put on the announcement, and the page is still live on purdue.edu twenty-three years later. The word "lifetime" appears four times on it — in the headline, in Purdue's own editorial voice, and inside a direct quote from the Purdue Alumni Association official who launched the service. "Permanent" appears twice more.
Nothing here had to be recovered from an archive or reconstructed from screenshots. Purdue published it, Purdue still hosts it, and anyone can read it in one click.
“A permanent lifetime e-mail address is the first of a series of electronic services the Purdue Alumni Association will be offering to alumni.”
Mark Wright, Purdue Alumni Association · Purdue News Service · October 2, 2003
read Purdue’s 2003 announcement ↗ · backup screenshot · read the Exponent’s coverage ↗ · backup screenshot
“Graduating students retain their @purdue.edu email address for 3 semesters.”
“a permanent lifetime e-mail address”
Purdue's own IT knowledge base states the student address expires after three semesters. That limit is published, precise, and has been enforced for years — so Purdue plainly knew how to say when an address would stop working, and said it where it meant it.
No condition of any kind was attached to the alumni address in the 2003 announcement. Not "subject to University policy." Not "as technology permits." Not a reserved right to discontinue. The alumni address was presented as the durable thing the temporary one handed off to.
Not a brochure, not a student publication, not an alumni newsletter. The Purdue News Service is the University's official communications arm, and the release carries a Purdue staff writer and a named Purdue Alumni Association source with a purdue.edu address.
“Purdue to provide lifetime e-mail addresses to alumni.” A headline is the one part of a release written to be quoted and remembered. Purdue chose that word for the position where it would do the most work.
The Purdue Alumni Association made the 2003 promise. Its staff and alumni-engagement function moved into the Purdue for Life Foundation in 2021, and the alumni email page today reads “Maintained by Purdue for Life Foundation.” The organization ending the service is the direct institutional successor to the one that made it.
Four things we are not claiming. A news release is a published representation, not a signed contract, and this site does not assert that any alum has a legal claim. The "keep in contact forever" line often attached to this story is from the Purdue Exponent's coverage two weeks later, not from Purdue's release — it is a student newspaper quoting Wright, and we cite it that way. Mark Wright's title, "director of financial operations for the Purdue Alumni Association," likewise comes from the Exponent; Purdue's own release gives him no title. And the service alumni have today is not the one announced in 2003: that was forwarding, and it became a hosted Microsoft mailbox somewhere around 2017. The address is the thing that was promised and the thing being taken away, but we are not going to pretend the plumbing behind it never changed.
What happened
The @alumni.purdue.edu service ends. Purdue's alumni email site now carries a single line: “This web site will be decommissioned on November 1, 2026.” New accounts stopped being issued on March 17, 2025.
source ↗There isn't one. Purdue has published no explanation on any official channel — not in the Purdue newsroom, not in Purdue Today, not from the Purdue for Life Foundation, not in the Exponent. The two notices alumni have received announce the ending and stop there. what Purdue has and hasn't said ↓
source ↗Nothing that has been published. No replacement mailbox, no paid tier, no forwarding grace period, no migration guidance. The service's own FAQ has not been updated to mention the shutdown at all.
source ↗Purdue alumni email already runs on Microsoft 365 — the FAQ describes a full account with a 50 GB quota. Microsoft 365 Education includes free alumni licensing, and modern forwarders preserve mail authentication end to end using ARC and SRS. The universities that kept the address did not converge on one fix; each picked one that suited its stack. five options open to Purdue ↓
source ↗The comparison Purdue has to answer
Writing about another university? This table is maintained as a standalone tracker, free to cite.
Storage stopped being free and forwarded mail started failing authentication — that pressure is real, and every school below hit it in the same window. 9 of Purdue's 17 Big Ten peers still give alumni a working address anyway, and they did not all pick the same fix. 3 narrowed theirs to a fee, a smaller mailbox, or a closed door for new graduates. 4 ended theirs outright, which is what Purdue is about to do — and every one of those 4 published its reasoning where alumni could read it. That is the line Purdue has not crossed back over. Not the decision. The silence around it.
| School | Outcome | What they did |
|---|---|---|
| Illinois | kept | Degree recipients keep email forwarding from their @illinois.edu address. Forwarding only — the university mailbox itself is deleted 30 days after student status ends. |
| Indiana | kept | Opt-in @alumni.iu.edu mailbox on Google Workspace, 5 GB, for graduates. The student @iu.edu address does not survive; forwards from it expire after a year. Accounts unused for 12 months are deprovisioned. |
| Iowa | never | Never offered an alumni email address. University email eligibility ends two years after graduation. Iowa's “lifetime” language applies to the HawkID login, not to email. |
| Maryland | kept | TERPmail accounts activated before graduation continue afterward. Maryland's own IT pages say alumni have access “for life” and that accounts “remain active indefinitely.” Storage drops to 15 GB. |
| Michigan | kept | Retained @umich.edu forwarding for alumni at no charge, alongside U-M Google accounts. |
| Michigan State | kept | Graduates keep their @msu.edu Spartan 365 mailbox. MSU states the offering is “subject to change at any time,” and did cut off inactive alumni once before, in 2012. Non-graduates get nothing. |
| Minnesota | restricted | Gmail-only @alumni.umn.edu accounts still work, but no new ones have been created since September 18, 2025, and anyone who graduated after June 2024 is ineligible. Sign in every 180 days or the account closes. |
| Nebraska | ended | Ended its “Email for Life” service on July 1, 2024 and deleted the mailbox contents, citing decreased usage, security, and cost. The alumni association page announcing it is still titled “Lifetime Email.” |
| Northwestern | kept | Free Google-powered @alum.northwestern.edu account for degree holders, on request — created even as Northwestern deletes the student address about 300 days after graduation, citing Google storage costs. |
| 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 commercial providers. |
| Oregon | ended | Retired alumni email forwarding on August 5, 2025, citing external providers rejecting forwarded mail. Oregon had launched the service in 2018 under its own headline: “Lifetime email forwarding.” |
| Penn State | restricted | An @alumni.psu.edu Google account exists, but only for current dues-paying members of the Alumni Association — $50 a year, or $700 for a life membership. Lapse the membership and the address goes with it. |
| Purdue | terminating | @alumni.purdue.edu is scheduled for decommissioning on November 1, 2026. New accounts stopped on March 17, 2025. Purdue has published no reason, no replacement, and no appeal route. |
| Rutgers | kept | Graduates keep a ScarletMail account. The Rutgers Foundation titles its page “Rutgers Email for Life” and Rutgers IT guidelines say access continues “as long as they keep using it.” No inactivity threshold is published. |
| UCLA | kept | Graduates are automatic members of the Alumni Association and may request an @alumni.ucla.edu address. UCLA's pages present it as forwarding rather than a mailbox. No fee is stated. |
| USC | kept | Degree recipients get an @alumni.usc.edu Gmail mailbox — 2 GB, email only, no Drive. Accounts not signed into for more than a year are subject to deletion. |
| Washington | restricted | Alumni have not been eligible for a UW mailbox since July 2018. The address itself survives: former students keep their UW NetID and can forward @uw.edu mail to a personal account. |
| Wisconsin | ended | Ended indefinite @wisc.edu access starting with spring 2023 graduates and applied it retroactively to alumni who already had it, citing licensing, security and storage cost. The separate @uwalumni.com address still works for existing holders but is closed to new ones. |
CU Boulder was going to shut its alumni addresses off on August 31, 2026, citing licensing costs and declining usage — close to Purdue's reasoning, on close to Purdue's timeline. On June 15, 2026 an alum sued for breach of contract, arguing alumni had already paid for the promise through a mandatory computing fee. Eight weeks later the suit was dropped, because CU settled — three weeks before the addresses were due to go dark. Its IT department now writes:
“Following a recent settlement agreement, CU Boulder is offering extended access to eligible alumni email account holders through at least Aug. 31, 2027, while we assess the long-term viability of the offering.”
University of Colorado Boulder, Office of Information Technology
The dismissal was without prejudice — the claim was never decided on its merits and can be refiled if CU does not extend again. What the university bought was a year and the room to reconsider, not the end of the question.
A second alum sued Temple University in December 2024 on the same breach-of-contract theory; his attempt to bring it as a class action was denied on a technicality, and his individual claim has not been reported since. Neither case involves Purdue, and none of this is legal advice — it is here because “there is no alternative” is harder to say after a peer institution has reopened the same decision. the filings, the courts and the sources ↗
This site is run by alumni, so it is worth reading people who are not us. Original reporting only.
The national survey of this trend. It covers the universities' stated reasons — phishing risk, storage that moved from nearly free to metered, deliverability — and reports that Harvard and Virginia Tech reversed course after alumni objected. Purdue is not mentioned in it, which is the point: the schools in this article all said something. Purdue has not.
The first substantial national reporting on alumni losing these addresses, and on what it actually costs people when a decades-old address stops working.
The part that makes this avoidable
Forwarding has always broken SPF. What changed is enforcement.
When a university forwards mail, it re-sends a message it did not write from a server the original sender never authorized. SPF has flagged that as a mismatch for twenty years, but receivers mostly let it slide. In February 2024 Google and Yahoo began requiring authentication from bulk senders, and the tolerance ended. Forwarded mail started landing in spam, or not landing at all.
That pressure is real, and it is why several universities moved or ended these services in the same window. It is not a reason the address has to disappear. SRS rewrites the envelope sender so SPF passes; ARC carries the original authentication verdict across the hop for the receiver to honour; and a hosted mailbox removes the second hop from the equation altogether.
Purdue has already done the hard part. The alumni address stopped being plain forwarding years ago and became a Microsoft 365 mailbox — the architecture that does not have this problem. Whatever is ending the service on November 1, it is not the deliverability failure that ended forwarding elsewhere.
Option A · Free under existing licensing
Keep doing what Purdue is doing now. The @alumni.purdue.edu address is already a Microsoft 365 mailbox with a 50 GB quota, per Purdue's own FAQ. Microsoft 365 Education includes free alumni licensing, and mail originating from an authenticated mailbox has no deliverability problem to solve. This option is not a migration. It is a decision not to switch anything off.
The cheapest option on this page, because the work is already done.
Option B · Free to modest
If 50 GB per alum is the cost concern, cut the quota rather than the address. USC runs alumni Gmail at 2 GB with no Drive. Indiana runs @alumni.iu.edu at 5 GB. Virginia Tech settled its alumni on 5 GB. A smaller mailbox keeps the address working and shrinks the storage bill by an order of magnitude.
Storage is a dial. It does not have to be a switch.
Option C · Free
Drop back to forwarding only, but route it through a forwarder that implements ARC and SRS. SRS rewrites the envelope sender so SPF passes; ARC preserves the original authentication verdict for the receiver to honour. Gmail and Microsoft both honour ARC. Cloudflare Email Routing does both, signs with DKIM, and stores no mail; Forward Email is an open-source alternative, so this isn't a single-vendor bet.
Stores nothing, so there is no mailbox to compromise and nothing to discover.
Option D · Cost-recovering
Charge a small annual fee, or fold the address into Purdue for Life membership. This covers any licensing cost, prunes the service down to alumni who actually want it — which shrinks the attack surface rather than growing it — and creates a written agreement with explicit terms, including a no-guarantee-of-delivery clause and a right to terminate for abuse. Penn State already gates its alumni address this way.
Solves cost and liability together. We would accept this outcome.
Option E · Free
Instead of terminating, require alumni to re-confirm every year or two to keep an address active. Dormant addresses lapse on their own and the population shrinks to the people using it. Minnesota closes accounts unused for 180 days; Indiana deprovisions after 12 months without a login; USC after a year. Each of them kept the service and let inactivity do the pruning.
Directly answers the dormant-account concern without breaking the promise.
No fix delivers 100% of mail. Even ARC and SRS can be rejected by some receivers, and a hosted mailbox can still be filtered. Any university that keeps an alumni address should say so plainly rather than implying a guarantee — Dartmouth publishes exactly that disclaimer alongside its lifetime forwarding and keeps the service running.
The ask here is not that Purdue guarantee delivery. It is that Purdue keep the address, publish honest terms about what it can and cannot promise, and say out loud why it is doing whatever it decides to do.
Purdue has not made all of these arguments publicly. They are the ones peer institutions made in the same situation, so they are the ones worth having an answer to.
True of plain forwarding, and it is why Oregon retired its alumni forwards in August 2025. It does not describe Purdue. The @alumni.purdue.edu address has not been a forwarder for years — Purdue's own FAQ describes a full Microsoft 365 account with a 50 GB quota, and mail sent from an authenticated mailbox does not have this failure mode. Purdue solved this problem already.
A real concern, and one with standard mitigations that do not require deleting the address: mandatory multi-factor authentication, disabled legacy authentication, and automatic deprovisioning of dormant accounts. Microsoft 365 supports all three natively. If the risk is accounts nobody watches, Option E prunes exactly those and keeps the rest.
Also real — both Google and Microsoft have tightened education storage since 2022. But Microsoft 365 Education still includes free alumni licensing, and a 50 GB mailbox is a choice rather than a floor. Northwestern faced this exact squeeze, ended the student mailbox over it, and still stood up a free alumni address rather than nothing. Cost explains a smaller mailbox. It does not explain no address.
Possibly true, and unverifiable from outside — Purdue has published no usage figure. Two cautions if one appears. Login counts undercount a forwarding address badly, because mail can pass through one daily while nobody ever signs in. And low usage is an argument for a smaller service, not for no service: the alumni still relying on the address are precisely the ones for whom losing it is expensive.
This is the actual state of the record, and it is the reason this site exists in the shape it does. Every peer institution that ended its alumni email published a rationale — Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oregon and Ohio State each said why, in writing, on their own pages. Alumni could read the reasoning and argue with it. Purdue has published nothing: no rationale, no alternative, no contact for appeal beyond an address that has gone unanswered since May. A decision nobody will explain is a decision nobody has to defend.
The record
Every figure below comes from alumni who confirmed a working Purdue address by clicking a link sent to it. Almost all are @alumni.purdue.edu — the address at issue. We also accept @purdue.edu, because Purdue lets graduating students keep that address for three semesters, so a recent graduate may hold it while the alumni one is still being set up or has already gone.
These are self-reported by people who chose to come here, so read the count as a floor rather than a survey: it is what alumni were motivated enough to put on the record, not an estimate of how many are affected. Because addresses are stored only as a one-way fingerprint, nobody — including us — can reconstruct the list.
Add your voice
A pile of complaints is easy to ignore. A counted list of verified alumni, with class years and giving history, is not. Add your name if you want to — the count works either way.
Do the other thing that works
Harvard reversed an identical decision in 2022 after about 2,800 alumni signed a petition. Colorado Boulder reopened its own after being sued. Purdue has not published a rationale it would have to climb down from, and the date has not arrived.
The alumni email page's own footer reads “Maintained by Purdue for Life Foundation.” The Purdue Alumni Association, which made the 2003 promise, moved its staff and alumni-engagement function into this foundation in 2021.
Daniels returned as interim president on July 1, 2026 — after this decision was announced, so it was not made under his leadership. He was president when the Purdue for Life Foundation was created in 2020, and he is in a position to reopen it.
The only contact address the Alumni Association publishes. The Association still exists as an entity with its own board and its role nominating three alumni trustees.
Listed on alumniemail.ud.purdue.edu as the contact for the service. Alumni who have written to it about the shutdown report no reply.
A phone call is harder to leave unanswered than an email, and a call logged by a staff member is a data point inside Purdue that an unread inbox never becomes.
Be brief and be civil. Give your name, your class year, and one sentence: you are asking Purdue to keep the alumni email address rather than decommission it on November 1, 2026, and to publish the reasoning either way. Ask for that to be recorded and passed on. The people answering these phones did not make this decision.
Choose who gets it, fill in the three blanks, and press send. It goes from your own email program — not through this site.
The first one ticked is addressed directly and receives it; the rest are copied in. A letter several people can see is harder to close quietly than one that only reached an inbox.
To ceo@purdueforlife.org
Subject: Keep the alumni email address — or explain why it is ending Dear Ms. Dussliere, I am a Purdue graduate, class of [YEAR]. I am writing about the decision to decommission @alumni.purdue.edu on November 1, 2026. On October 2, 2003, Purdue's own News Service announced this service under the headline "Purdue to provide lifetime e-mail addresses to alumni." In that release, a Purdue Alumni Association official described it as "a permanent lifetime e-mail address." That page is still on purdue.edu today. I have been unable to find any published explanation for ending it. The service page carries a single line about decommissioning; the FAQ beside it still explains how to register for an account that has not been available since March 2025. I have found no statement from the University, the Purdue for Life Foundation, or the Alumni Association giving a reason. I am asking for three things. First, publish the reasoning. Every peer institution that ended its alumni email — Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oregon, Ohio State — said why, on its own pages. Alumni could read the rationale and respond to it. Purdue's alumni have been given nothing to respond to. Second, defer the November 1 date while that reasoning is public and alumni can respond. A date that arrives before any explanation does forecloses the conversation rather than concluding it. Third, keep the address. It already runs on Microsoft 365, which includes free alumni licensing, and the storage cost is a quota setting rather than a fixed obligation. If cost is the constraint, reduce the mailbox — Indiana runs 5 GB, USC runs 2 GB. If dormant accounts are the concern, require re-registration and let unused addresses lapse. If the service must be paid for, charge for it; I would rather pay than lose the address. [ONE OR TWO SENTENCES ABOUT WHAT THIS ADDRESS IS ATTACHED TO FOR YOU — professional licensure, publications, a business, accounts you cannot easily change, people who only know how to reach you there.] I am not asking Purdue to guarantee that every message arrives. I am asking Purdue not to quietly withdraw something it announced, in a headline, as lasting a lifetime. Sincerely, [YOUR NAME] Purdue University, Class of [YEAR] [YOUR CITY, STATE]
The button opens your own email program with the letter already in it — nothing is sent from this page, and we never see it. If your mail lives in a browser tab and the button does nothing, copy the letter instead and paste it in. Either way it comes from you, which is the entire point: a letter Purdue can trace to a real alumnus counts for more than any number on this page.
Reach the campaign
This reaches the campaign, not Purdue. To write to Purdue, use the letter above — it sends from your own email program.
Corrections, questions from press, and alumni who want to help organize.
If you're reporting a factual error on this page, quote the line and say what's wrong — accuracy is the whole argument here, and a sourced correction gets made.