Reference · last checked September 2026
What every Big Ten university does about alumni email
Two things changed for every university at once. Forwarded mail began failing authentication after Google and Yahoo started requiring it from bulk senders on February 1, 2024, and Microsoft began rejecting under-authenticated mail outright on May 5, 2025. Separately, Google and Microsoft both ended the effectively unlimited education storage that made these services free to run. Every school below faced both. They did not reach the same conclusion.
| University | 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 offered | 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 | Narrowed | 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 | Narrowed | 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 | Scheduled | @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 | Narrowed | 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. |
How to read the labels
Kept
Alumni can get a working address at the university today. This covers several different arrangements — a hosted mailbox on Google or Microsoft, plain forwarding that was kept and repaired, or a new alumni domain standing in for a student address that expires. “Kept” is not a claim that the school promised anything: only Maryland and Rutgers use for-life language about their own alumni email, and this table does not put that phrasing in anyone else’s mouth.
Narrowed
The address survives but the service was cut back. Penn State gates it behind paid Alumni Association membership. Minnesota stopped creating accounts in September 2025 and excludes anyone who graduated after June 2024. Washington ended alumni mailboxes in 2018 but still lets former students forward their @uw.edu address.
Never offered
A school that never had an alumni email service, which is not the same as one that ended it and must not be counted as though it were. Iowa is the only Big Ten member in this position. Its own pages do use “lifetime” — about the HawkID login, not about email.
Ended and Scheduled
Ended means alumni have already lost the address. Scheduled means a date has been set and has not yet arrived — which as of this writing is Purdue alone, on November 1, 2026.
What is not settled. Every row was verified against the university’s own pages in September 2026, and two carry uncertainty worth stating. Penn State’s authoritative alumni-email benefit page blocks automated access, so its row is built from the Association’s membership and FAQ pages instead. Rutgers’ own alumni page carries an unexplained notice about “an upcoming change in email service” with no date and no detail — if that is a wind-down, the Rutgers row changes. Where a school states no price, this table says “no fee stated” rather than “free.” If a row is wrong, tell us and it gets corrected with a note.
Not a Purdue alum? If your university ended, changed or kept its alumni email and it is not on this table — or a row here is out of date — tell us what happened and it gets added with a source. Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oregon and Ohio State alumni have already lost the address; Duke, Temple, Columbia and Vanderbilt alumni are living through a version of the same thing outside the Big Ten. Each set of alumni has been told it was a local technical decision, and almost none of them has been shown what the others did. A sibling campaign keeps the same kind of record for Duke at dukebrokenpromises.com.
Free to cite, quote or reproduce with a link. Maintained by an independent campaign of Purdue alumni, unaffiliated with Purdue University, which is documenting Purdue’s own decision at purduebrokenpromises.com and the 2003 Purdue news release headlined “Purdue to provide lifetime e-mail addresses to alumni” at /evidence.