As you may have seen, the alumni email service is being decommissioned from June 2025, and alumni will no longer have access to their university email accounts after this time. This change is being overseen by the Identity and Access Management (IDAM) Project, which focuses on supporting access to better and more secure digital services for current students, staff, and visitors.
In line with many universities globally, this decommissioning exercise is being carried out for several important reasons:
- The number of alumni actively accessing their university email accounts is very low (between 1-3%), and removing this underused service will help us to further tighten our cyber security
- Further to the above, many of these accounts do not have Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) switched on, which could make them (and the University) vulnerable to cyber-attack
- Additionally, there are relatively high costs associated with the ongoing maintenance of this service
The University of Southampton’s alumni community is important to us, and we are committed to staying in touch with as many of them as possible, ensuring that we do so using modern and secure methods.
ODAR (Office of Development and Alumni Relations) have processes in place, managed through the Blackbaud platform, to ensure that schools and departments can access the most up to date alumni information for all contact purposes. ODAR will continue to work hard to ensure that alumni data is maintained, accurate, and accessible.
For more information on communicating with our alumni community, please see this guidance on requesting alumni data, or please access ODAR’s Data Request form.