Primary source · still live on purdue.edu

Purdue put the word “lifetime” in the headline

Purdue is switching off @alumni.purdue.edu on November 1, 2026. Its complete public statement is one sentence: “This web site will be decommissioned on November 1, 2026.” No reason has been published anywhere. This page is the record of what Purdue said about the same service when it launched it — and every source on it is live right now, on a Purdue domain, checkable without trusting a word of this site.

“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

Purdue knew how to write an expiry date

This is the detail that is easy to miss and hardest to explain away. Purdue has always been precise about when the student address stops working — its IT knowledge base puts a hard number on it. It attached no limit of any kind to the alumni address it called permanent.

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.

The whole record, in six documents

Every row below is a page that is live on a Purdue domain as this is written, and each carries a second link to a screenshot of it. Open either and check. There are Internet Archive captures of the wind-down as well, and they are deliberately not used here: this campaign could not verify them independently, and a live purdue.edu URL is a better citation than a snapshot in every respect that matters.

The last two rows are the ones worth sitting with. Purdue’s alumni email site says the service ends on November 1. The FAQ one click away still explains how to sign up for it — four of its twelve questions are sign-up instructions — and the registration pages still load. Those pages have contradicted each other for months. The FAQ screenshots are in two parts: questions 1–6 questions 6–12

The one clause Purdue could point to

A campaign that hides its opponent’s best document deserves to lose, so here is Purdue’s, in full and unedited. It is the only reservation-of-rights language published anywhere on the service.

“This service is free for Purdue Alumni and as such we reserve the right to discontinue service for any account at our discretion that we believe violates the intended spirit of the service.”

Terms of Use · alumniemail.ud.purdue.edu/Policy.aspx

source ↗ backup screenshot

The screenshot is worth opening for this one. The sentence does not stand alone: it closes a page headed “Terms of Use” that lists six violations of the service and then two disciplinary actions — temporary suspension, and permanent ban, both of an individual account. That is the context the clause was written in.

This is the closest thing to a reservation of rights that Purdue has published, and it is worth reading precisely rather than dismissing. On its face the clause is per-account and conduct-based: it reserves the right to discontinue service for any account that violates the intended spirit of the service. That is a misuse provision — the kind every mail service has — rather than a reserved right to end the service for everyone. We are not lawyers and this is not a legal argument. It is an observation about what the sentence says. If Purdue has published a term that does reserve the right to shut the whole service down, we will put it on this page.

Why this document rather than a brochure

What this is not

The same problem, across the Big Ten

Forwarding broke for everyone — SPF and DMARC enforcement is an industry-wide change, not something Purdue did, and storage stopped being free for every university at once. The question is what each school concluded from it. Of Purdue’s 17 Big Ten peers: 9 still give alumni a working address, 3 have narrowed theirs, 4 have ended theirs, and 1 never offered one. Purdue is the one with a date still ahead of it.

This site is not going to tell you that number is lopsided, because it is not. Four of Purdue’s peers did what Purdue is doing. What separates Purdue is not the decision — it is that every one of those four published its reasoning, on its own pages, where alumni could read it and argue with it. Wisconsin cited licensing, security and storage cost. Nebraska cited usage, security and cost. Oregon cited providers rejecting forwarded mail. Ohio State cited all of it. Purdue has cited nothing.

When alumni went to court

Two alumni have sued their universities over terminated lifetime email. One case ended with the university extending the service and reopening the decision. Both are matters of public record and neither involves Purdue.

Separately, and reported by The Temple News rather than alleged in any complaint: in 2022 Temple altered the alumni account agreement. Alumni who went to update a password during the university's move from Google to Microsoft were presented with a checkbox whose terms gave up the lifetime access they had previously been promised. Consent obtained at a password prompt, for a right granted years earlier. Purdue has not done this — its terms still say what they said — which is worth stating plainly, because the criticism here is silence, not sleight of hand.