Alumni Are Forever. Alumni Email Addresses Aren’t.

Jobs come and go. Friendships fade. But a Duke University alumni email address is forever.

At least, that’s what Ara Karamanian thought Duke meant when it gave him and thousands of other graduates “free lifetime” access to an @alumni.duke.edu address. “A lot of us accepted that promise at face value,” Karamanian, a radiologist who has used his Duke alumni email address for personal and professional communication for more than 20 years, told Inside Higher Ed.

In addition to serving as a reliable, long-term nexus for managing access to the apps, accounts and digital correspondence governing modern life, he said sending emails from a @alumni.duke.edu address carries “a certain level of cachet and credibility” that benefits both alumni and the university. “Generally the graduates of Duke are cut above average,” said Karamanian, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering in 2002. “Seeing good people associated with Duke University (via their alumni email address) is the cheapest and best marketing tool it has.”

So, he was outraged when Duke announced in May that it planned to discontinue alumni email addresses (which forward to an outside personal account, such as Gmail) on July 31 of this year due to “increasingly restrictive security policies among external email service providers” that has resulted in unreliable delivery.

“When a corporation sells you something with a promise and destroys that promise, maybe they can get away with that. But you would expect something better from Duke University,” Karamanian said. “This is supposed to be a prestigious, high-end university with a very high-end engineering school, and they can’t get email to work?”

‘Ridiculous’ or Responsible?

Karamanian isn’t the only alumnus feeling skeptical, frustrated and betrayed.

“This is ridiculous,” one Reddit user posted on r/duke. “So they can charge > 90k per year but not give alumni the most basic thing ever oh OK,” wrote another. A self-identified alumni interviewer said their “duke.edu address gives a bit more confidence to the kids I interview that I’m for real and not a scam,” while someone else who uses it “for everything” said “it never occurred to me they would pull the rug out.”

Opponents have also launched a website—dukebrokenpromises.com—for alumni to put their grievances on the record to show what shutting off email access “costs the people who believed the promise.” So far, 87 verified alumni who graduated between 1975 and 2026 have submitted objections, and 83 percent of them say losing their alumni email address will have a “moderate to severe” impact on the management of their personal and professional communication.

The outcry was enough to sway the university to delay sunsetting alumni email until Jan. 31, 2027, to “allow for an easier transition,” according to a webpage that answers frequently asked questions about the Duke alumni email debacle. However, the decision still stands, as the university claims that maintaining the alumni addresses for life is no longer feasible.

“When this was initially named a ‘lifetime’ benefit decades ago, email was nascent,” the website says. “As email providers matured and evolved the product over time, it became clear that we could no longer offer a ‘benefit’ (particularly for a ‘lifetime’ or in perpetuity) with widespread and prominent inconsistency and reliability in message delivery.”

As Tracey Temne, associate vice president for marketing, communications and stewardship with Duke Alumni Engagement and Development, put it in an email to Inside Higher Ed, “We can no longer guarantee messages sent to these email addresses will be delivered,” adding, “many of our peer institutions are taking similar action for the same reason.”

Changing Value Proposition

Rising technology costs and increased cybersecurity threats have pushed several other universities—including Columbia, Temple and Ohio State—to stop offering lifetime alumni email addresses over the past several years as well.

“When universities first started handing out email addresses, it was really difficult otherwise to get an email address. There weren’t free services everywhere offering them, so it was valuable” for both alumni and alumni associations, Josh Callahan, chief information security officer at California State University, told Inside Higher Ed. “It was also a relatively low-cost thing for universities to offer because at the time they were running those services internally at a low, marginal cost.”

But the cost-benefit ratio has changed in the three decades since most universities adopted email.

Not only has it become much easier to get a free email address, but “now, pretty much everybody is using hosted email,” said Callahan, who oversaw the partial elimination of lifetime alumni email addresses at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. “Universities are either using the Google Suite or Microsoft Office 365, both of which have gone from almost free to now charging for storage footprint because everyone’s costs are going up.”

Beyond the financial costs, universities also have to weigh “the risk footprint in each account they’re managing,” he said. “Phishing is a growing issue, and having a lot of accounts owned by people who aren’t directly tied to the university community—and aren’t necessarily seeing your phishing-prevention tips—add to an institution’s cybersecurity risk. And now, institutions typically have to pay for multifactor authentication to keep the accounts, so they have that rising cost, too.”

Those issues are major concerns for universities across the country, including several that have been targeted by cybercriminals over the past year. According to Inside Higher Ed’s 2026 Survey of Campus Chief Technology/Information Officers, CTOs believe cybersecurity threats and unsustainable cost trajectories are two of the biggest risks to their institutions.

Although eliminating alumni email addresses may help alleviate some of those worries, many universities have found workarounds to keep the addresses live, including Princeton, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. But when universities have gone the elimination route, it almost always generates the kind of fierce pushback now coming from Duke alumni.

That backlash pushed Harvard University and Virginia Tech to reverse course and preserve their alumni addresses. And this summer, a University of Colorado at Boulder alumnus sued the university for breach of contract after it announced it was ending the email service, citing “significant security risks, declining usage, rising licensing costs, and evolving compliance requirements.” The litigation has since resulted in a settlement and extension of the email sunset deadline while the university assesses the long-term viability of offering lifetime alumni email addresses.

Callahan also encountered initial opposition when Cal Poly Humboldt announced its plan to do away with alumni email addresses. The alumni association said they feared losing contact with graduates who could be potential donors or networking contacts.

“But as they started looking at their numbers, they realized that their newsletter wasn’t getting opened by the .edu addresses, whereas the Gmail.com addresses were opening and reading it,” he said. “Students aren’t using those accounts anymore after graduation. They’re using the free Gmail account that they get and keep as they move from position to position and expand their professional life.”

Breeding ‘Cynicism’

Even if fewer people regularly use their alumni email addresses these days, the personal benefits remain, said Noah D. Drezner, a professor of higher education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

“An alumni email address functions as a permanent, verifiable credential. In professional networking and job applications, an email address bearing an elite institutional name carries high credibility and implicit prestige, serving as a clear form of social capital,” he told Inside Higher Ed in an email. “This form of capital is not associated with a free Gmail account.”

Beyond status, “many alumni view their email as a digital anchor that reinforces their identity and connection to the institution,” he added.

“Alumni engagement and philanthropy rely heavily on that sense of belonging and a graduate’s foundational trust in their alma mater. Breaking a core promise over what many perceive as a solvable IT issue breeds a cynicism that directly damages that trust and perhaps their sense of belonging—ultimately potentially threatening future engagement and giving.”