Duke University is ending its alumni email forwarding service, a benefit the university called "lifetime" when it launched in the late 1990s and that some graduates have used as their sole professional contact ever since.
The service was never an inbox. It worked as a redirect, routing any message sent to an @alumni.duke.edu address to whatever personal account the alumnus had on file, with the option to update that destination over time. For graduates who changed jobs, cities, or email providers over nearly three decades, the address stayed constant. A lot of professional identities got built around that constancy.
Duke announced the end of the service roughly two weeks before May 18. Tracey Temne, Duke's associate vice president for marketing, communications and stewardship, said the decision followed "careful consideration" and was made to "ensure we are providing the best services to our alumni." The university initially set a July 31 deadline. Alumni objected through university inboxes and the Duke subreddit, and Duke extended the cutoff to Jan. 31, 2027.
That extension didn't satisfy everyone. Aaron Roberts, a D.Phil. '15 and M.A. '16 alumnus, wrote in an email to Duke administrators, "I'm grateful the feedback was heard. But more time to accept a broken promise is not a resolution."
Bill Howell got his forwarding address in December 1999 after finishing his MBA at the Fuqua School of Business. He's among the alumni who treated the address as permanent, as Duke once promised it would be.
The Jan. 31, 2027 deadline is now fixed. Alumni who haven't updated accounts, professional listings, or contact info tied to their @alumni.duke.edu address have about eight months to do it.