‘fas.alumni’ E-Mail Cancelled

Returning from a vacation in Morocco earlier this month, Randy D. Xu ’04 logged on to check his alumni e-mail account and received an unexpected message from the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA).

“Thank you for taking part in the email pilot program for the classes of ’03 and ’04,” the unsigned note read. “Unfortunately, due to up-coming technology changes, the HAA will no longer be able to support this functionality....We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.”

His customized fas.alumni.harvard.edu address, the note said, would be cancelled, effective August 1.

The letter concluded by advising him to visit Yahoo!, Hotmail, or Google if he needed to replace his account.

“I remember reading something like [the account] was in testing,” Xu said. “But I didn’t know that it would just close.”

Xu is one of about 1,800 College graduates from the Classes of 2003 and 2004 who registered for free fas.alumni e-mail addresses under an HAA trial program.

Since 1997, Harvard has offered all graduates of the University a post.harvard e-mail address. That service forwards e-mail to another address specified by the user, but does not store e-mail on Harvard servers.

The fas.alumni accounts were designed to give College graduates a three-megabyte inbox accessible from a web browser, in addition to the post.harvard forwarding address.

There are no plans to alter the post.harvard forwarding service. But the fas.alumni addresses—which seemed like a good idea in 2003, according to HAA spokesman Andrew K. Tiedemann—later proved too expensive, costing Harvard more than $20 a month to maintain each three-megabyte account.

The services HAA recommended in its cancellation notice provide large inboxes at no cost to users—Gmail, Google’s popular mail service, provides the largest free inbox of the three, offering users over two gigabytes of disk space.

“Once the Google announcement came out [in April 2004], we didn’t want to be in this market anymore,” Tiedemann said. “We would have needed alumni to pay for the service.”

When HAA switches online vendors next month, it will lose the capability of administering web-based e-mail. But Tiedemann said HAA probably would have canceled the fas.alumni accounts anyway.

Because most graduates use the post.harvard service harnessed to a work-based e-mail—Harvard forwards more than 4.5 million post.harvard messages each month—Tiedemann said he did not expect “very many people” to be seriously affected by fas.alumni’s shutdown.

But both the post.harvard system and the free e-mail alternatives touted by HAA have their drawbacks.

Mike L. Armstrong ’03, an investment banker at JP Morgan in New York, currently forwards his post.harvard mail to his fas.alumni account. That way, he said, he can keep personal messages out of his company inbox, while still checking them at work via Harvard’s fas.alumni website.

Once fas.alumni closes, Armstrong will forward his post.harvard mail to a Yahoo! account instead. But he said he will no longer be able to check his personal mail from work, because JP Morgan blocks access to sites like Yahoo!.

Armstrong said that the fas.alumni account was not advertised to him as part of a pilot test.

“I signed on one day, and [the web site] said we offer e-mail accounts on our server,” Armstrong said.

And on one Class of 2003 graduate’s HAA web page obtained by The Crimson, Harvard was still advertising a “new 2003 email account,” and a sign-up page appeared still to be functioning. The page did not suggest that the fas.alumni accounts were offered on a trial basis.

With the close of the fas.alumni accounts, Harvard’s policy of only providing forwarding addresses to its graduates will be akin to those of its peer institutions, including Brown, Columbia, Duke, MIT, and Yale.

At Stanford, graduates can register for a free 10-megabyte full account. But if they want a larger storage limit, Stanford charges them $30 a year for a 250-megabyte account.

The university currently most similar to Harvard is Princeton, which, in addition to forwarding, administers a small number of full alumni accounts—mostly leftovers from a decade ago, when free e-mail options were scarce.

Kathy Taylor, the director of special projects at Princeton’s alumni council, called those full accounts “very rudimentary,” and said Princeton had suspended new registration for the hosted accounts earlier this year as it reviewed whether to continue offering them.

—Staff writer Brendan R. Linn can be reached at blinn@fas.harvard.edu.