Alumni Email Forwarding: Discontinued
Reed College is in the process of discontinuing the alumni email forwarding service due to changes made by email service providers. If you were directed to this page after sending an email to someone at an "@alumni.reed.edu" email address, please note that your email will not reach their inbox. We encourage you to find other ways to reach out.
In February 2024, Google, Yahoo, and other major email providers have begun making changes that make simple email forwarding harder to operate at scale. Consequently we have phased out our @alumni.reed(.edu) email forwarding service.
If you were actively using your email forwarding address, we recommend you remove it from any place it’s currently listed (for example, your website, your LinkedIn profile, etc.) or used as a recovery email, and replace it with a work or personal email. In turn, we also suggest updating your IRIS profile and other contact information with people who regularly use your email forwarding address so they can start reaching out to you through a different email.
We hear and understand the concerns alumni have about email forwarding addresses. Email forwarding, in general, is becoming obsolete as service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook develop new security protocols. New spam rules and policies make it difficult to offer a reliable forwarding service. Reed joins many institutions that have discontinued alumni email forwarding.
More specifically:
- Email forwarding for alumni was set up when email was in its nascence. Over the past 20 years, email services and service providers have matured.
- As spam filtering policies get more aggressive, email service providers routinely flag forwarded mail as spam and block emails from forwarding services; in short, emails sent to an email forwarding address, like your @alumni.reed(.edu) address, are often not delivered. Many users don’t even realize this until a sender has reached out to ask about an email.
- Email forwarding addresses are only an alias from which emails can be received but not sent. In most cases, responses to emails sent to email forwarding accounts come from your personal email inbox, and subsequent communication is likely to occur through your inbox.
- Many alumni have been frustrated with the service and report concerns about emails they have yet to receive, spam and phishing inquiries through their forwarding accounts, and more. Due to the nature of email forwarding technology, in most instances, we cannot resolve their complaints.
We were glad to provide a post-graduation bridge to keep alumni connected in the years before social media and other tools that now make connections easier to maintain. In the years to come, we look forward to continuing to reinforce the interconnectedness of the Reed community through events like Reunions, Reed on the Road, Alumni Board chapter city gatherings, and more.
Thank you for understanding,
The Alumni Relations Team