Princeton just cut alumni email forwarding. The tradeoff was avoidable.

Princeton’s Office of Information Technology announced in February that it will end alumni email forwarding for the Class of 2026 and beyond. Undergraduate NetIDs now expire 60 days after graduation instead of 65, and the 430-day forwarding window that used to carry student email to a new alumni address disappears entirely.

The rationale, according to the university spokesperson, is “licensing for software used at the University, access to resources as an active member of the University and increased cyber threats.” The translation is straightforward: Google Workspace storage is finite, security and licensing costs scale with active mailboxes, and the easiest line item to delete is the one supporting people who no longer pay tuition.

The math is real. The decision is also the wrong call.

The forwarding problem is real, but it is not a storage problem

What Princeton is solving for, in practice, is storage and license cost on Google Workspace EDU. When Google capped institutional storage, every higher-ed IT team had to make a hard decision about what to keep alive after a student left.

The trap is that “alumni email forwarding” sounds like the same line item as “alumni mailbox.” It is not. A forwarding entry costs zero storage. It just maps an old address to a new one. The cost of running it is operational: SPF, DKIM, DMARC alignment, bounce handling, abuse complaints, mailing-list authentication, opt-out tracking, and self-service updates when an alumna changes her personal email for the third time. None of that lives on the disk.

Why “just stand up a forwarder” rarely works

In theory, you can write a few hundred lines of Postfix or Exchange Online configuration, point university.edu mail to a forwarding host, and call it done. In practice, here is what eats your team’s time:

1. Deliverability decay. Forwarded mail breaks SPF the moment it leaves your domain. DMARC alignment fails. Major providers start to junk or reject your alumni traffic. By month three, a meaningful share of forwarded mail no longer reaches its destination.
2. Abuse handling. The alumni list is a juicy target for credential stuffing and spam relay. You will get listed on Spamhaus the first time someone takes over a compromised forwarder.
3. Self-service. Alumni change jobs, change ISPs, change marriage names. Every forwarding entry rots. Without a portal that lets the alum update their own destination, every change is a ticket.
4. Compliance. CAN-SPAM, GDPR, the university’s privacy policy, and FERPA all need an audit trail of who chose what forwarding destination and when.

None of this is interesting work. None of it directly serves the institution’s mission. All of it is the kind of work that gets quietly deferred until something breaks publicly.

When an IT team looks at the alumni forwarding line item three years in and sees a quiet operational liability that produces no academic value, cutting it is rational. The decision worth pushing back on is the one that put the work inside the institution in the first place.

What the actual tradeoff should be

The institutional question is not “should we keep running alumni email forwarding.” It is “should we be in the alumni email forwarding business at all.”

Storage on Google Workspace is a real constraint. Forwarding is not the same thing as storage. A dedicated forwarding service holds no mailbox, consumes no Workspace seat, and stays off your DMARC policy. Alumni keep their @school.edu address. Mail routes cleanly. When they update their personal destination, they do it themselves. Bounce and abuse handling is somebody else’s problem.

That keeps three things intact that Princeton is about to lose:

1. The alumni address as a stable identity. A senior who lists their senior@princeton.edu address on a recommendation letter, a grad school application, or a job offer does not have to chase down every recipient when their NetID expires.
2. The university’s relationship with the graduating class. The first communication after Commencement should not be “your email stops working in 60 days.”
3. A clean path for development office outreach. Forwarding addresses are how you reach alumni who have not yet opted in to the official alumni list, which is most of them in year one.

Where we land

Princeton’s IT team made the call they had to make given the assumptions they had. The assumption worth challenging is that running alumni forwarding internally was ever the right shape of the work. The pieces that make forwarding hard, deliverability, abuse, self-service, and compliance, are exactly the pieces that get cheaper at scale. They do not get cheaper inside a single institution.

If your team is sitting on the same Google Workspace storage conversation that Princeton just had, the right tradeoff is probably not to cut alumni forwarding. It is to stop owning the parts of it that consume the most time and produce the least academic value.

That is the part we do.