The university’s decision to end the “Email for Life” program means thousands of alumni will lose access to their @colorado.edu inboxes this August (Courtesy of Creative Commons)
The University of Colorado Boulder will end its “Email for Life” program on Aug. 31. The program, which allows alumni to retain their @colorado.edu email addresses as they move into the workforce, began in 2005 and promised alumni they would be able to continue using their email address for their professional, academic and personal purposes.
The university contacted alumni through email in March, telling them to transfer emails and files to a personal account before their @colorado.edu addresses expire in August.
Many CU Boulder alumni are upset by the decision, saying their email addresses serve as an important identifier. Some have pushed back by contacting the university and even creating a petition garnering over 1,000 signatures asking CU Boulder to reverse the decision.
“The issue is not so much that they’re not providing email for life,” 2015 alumnus Murray Smith said. “It’s more that they’re not following through on promises made to the university community.”
“They’re really not giving people enough time. I know there’s people who have had these email accounts for over twenty years, and they’re going to have to move all of their stuff over,” Smith said.
Smith pointed out that sending and receiving emails from a Colorado account is a way to represent oneself professionally and helps keep people tied to the university.
“I think it’s kind of a slap in the face because they framed it as something that was supposed to last forever,” said Gavin Flores, a current business student at CU Boulder. “Using the alumni network and programs becomes a little bit more challenging without an active @colorado.edu email.”
Leslie Minor, who earned her bachelor’s of science and applied math degrees at CU Boulder, was disappointed by what she called a lack of consideration for alternatives.
“There are so many other options,” she said. “You could forward emails, you could offer a service where alums pay for it. I’ll pay $5 a month.”
Minor also said that the university could purge inactive email accounts after a certain period to reduce the financial burden. The university did not give alumni an option to pay for a separate service.
“It feels like the weight of [email] being people’s identifier isn’t taken into account with how quickly they discontinued it,” Minor said.
Because the university promised to maintain alumni emails, Minor used her Colorado email extensively for real-life personal contacts.
The university said they considered these options, as well as creating a separate, alumni-only email program. However, according to Nicole Cousins, a spokesperson for CU Boulder, they would not have addressed the changing digital environment and issues of “unsustainable costs and growing cybersecurity risks.”
Cousins said the university engaged in a multi-year analysis before deciding to end the program. Yet some like Smith, are disappointed by the lack of notice.
“They’ve been hollowing out the services they promised students would be able to keep for life,” Smith said.
When Smith attended CU, the university still used Google services and provided students with unlimited storage. In 2021, Google ended its program providing unlimited storage to the academic community. Since then, the university has switched to Microsoft, which announced a 100 TB pooled storage limit in 2023 due to rising costs.
After the university’s analysis, it decided to end the program with the goal of keeping tuition accessible and “prioritizing student success,” according to Cousins.
“In 2005, we didn’t know what serious cybersecurity risks today’s digital environment would bring. If we knew what we know now, we wouldn’t have called it ‘Email for Life,’” Cousins said.
For alumni like Smith and Minor, the loss of an inbox is more than a technical hurdle, it is a loss of a personal identifier and tie to their alma mater. As the August expiration approaches, alumni have continued to advocate for keeping their email tied to CU Boulder despite the university’s insistence that the digital landscape has simply outgrown its old promises.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Emily Doskow at emily.doskow@colorado.edu.
