Harvard Alumni E-mail Forwarding
May 1, 2023 update from the Harvard Alumni Association
Last fall, in response to alumni outreach, the University decided not to discontinue Harvard’s @post.harvard.edu and @alumni.harvard.edu email forwarding service.
Since then, Harvard IT and Alumni Affairs and Development teams have explored alternatives to the University’s current email forwarding offering. The approach to this research was guided by several factors, including:
- Strong support from the alumni community for the continuation of email forwarding;
- The lack of sustainability inherent in Harvard’s current email forwarding infrastructure, which encounters significant problems like frequent bounced emails, spam, and phishing inquiries;
- Ensuring alumni with email forwarding addresses can both keep their existing email and experience a smooth transition to a new solution.
As a result of this research, the University will be creating a new partnership with an external email forwarding service that we are confident will add significant value to this program. As an international company, they also effectively manage privacy regulations and compliance requirements. With this partnership, we expect a more strategic approach to leveraging new and changing technologies in the years ahead.
We will offer the service first to the Classes of 2021 and 2022 later this summer, since these recent graduates did not have the opportunity to set up email forwarding and for whom the student @harvard.edu email service had expired. Following that, we’ll expand our offering to the graduating Class of 2023; then, this fall, we will begin a phased migration of existing email forwarding addresses. After the migration is complete, in 2024, we will open the service to other members of our alumni community who are not currently using email forwarding, as well as subsequent graduating classes.
Our primary goal throughout this process is to minimize the impact on current users and provide an easy setup of email forwarding for new users. We appreciate your patience as we move forward and plan to be in touch in the coming months with more detailed information.
In the meantime, you can keep using your email forwarding address as you have been and don’t need to do anything right now. We will reach out once we know the exact timing of the migration of your email into our new system and will share anything you may need to do to prepare at that point. You will be able to keep your existing email forwarding address in its exact form when it is migrated over.
If you still have questions about this transition and what it means for you, we encourage you to review our email forwarding FAQ.
Finally, while we have found a new solution for email forwarding that will replace the current aging and ineffective solution, like all technology, we anticipate it changing over time. Please note, due to the unreliability of the existing technology, you may still have issues with bounced emails, spam, and phishing until we migrate your address.
We want to thank all email forwarding users in our alumni community for reaching out and sharing how important this service is to you. We look forward to providing you with a much better email forwarding experience soon.
All best,
Harvard Alumni Association