Harvard Alumni Email Forwarding Services to Remain Unchanged Despite Student Protest

Despite requests from graduate students, new Harvard alumni will not regain alumni addresses and will instead have to continue using an email forwarding service, Harvard Alumni Association Executive Director Sarah Karmon said Monday night.

Karmon appeared at a Monday night meeting of the Harvard Graduate Council, which called on Harvard University Information Technology to provide lifetime Harvard email addresses for alumni in a March 18 resolution.

Though Harvard graduates prior to the class of 2021 had been able to create an @post.harvard.edu or @alumni.harvard.edu email forwarding address, the HAA announced in 2021 that it was discontinuing the ability to create alumni email addresses.

The HAA said in 2022 that it would deactivate all alumni email forwarding addresses — before reversing the decision a month later. The HAA announced last year that alumni could continue to receive emails through an external email forwarding service.

In the resolution, the HGC said that a handful of universities — including the University of California, San Diego, the University of Michigan, and New York University — “have instituted ‘Email for Life’ policies where alumni are provided permanent access to their university email addresses, allowing them to send and receive email from these accounts.”

The body asked that HUIT “work towards providing graduates from all Harvard schools the ability to send email from their respective Harvard-issued email addresses for life, whether for free, or in exchange for remuneration.”

At the meeting, Karmon confirmed that the University would be unable to grant lifetime email addresses to Harvard graduates.

“There are lots of complications and challenges with inboxes. And talking to our peers, talking to HUIT, and talking to alumni about how they use the tool and service, we made the decision to stick with a forwarding service instead of an inbox,” Karmon said.

“But again, even if we had offered an inbox, it would not have been a continuation of your student account that resides with us. So I know there are people who are interested in inboxes, we feel like the email forwarding service offers alumni what they need,” Karmon added.

She said providing official Harvard emails to alumni could lead to legal issues, citing past incidents in which Harvard graduates used their alumni addresses to conduct business that resulted in the University being involved in various lawsuits.

“We often are a part of discovery in lawsuits where alumni have used their email address to conduct business,” Karmon said. “Right now, we don’t have to engage in that, because we don’t have the emails; we’re just a pass through. If we had the inboxes, we would have to actually share all that information in discovery.”

Several new resolutions were also proposed at the end of the meeting, including a request for Harvard to increase van service hours for students with disabilities and a proposal to create a committee to sell publicly available HGC merchandise.

The HGC also proposed a request for Harvard administrators to install security cameras on Harvard housing units during the next year following multiple reports of thefts in housing lobbies and residential mailrooms.

—Staff writer Adina R. Lippman can be reached at adina.lippman@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Angelina J. Parker can be reached at angelina.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @angelinajparker.