Email account - Offboarding resources for students
Alumni email account - How to download emails
This article explains what happens to your student email account when you graduate or leave and what you need to do to access your new alumni email account.
Once you receive your final results, the Student Office marks you as "Qualified" or "Leaver" , and you retain access to your full student computing account for approximately 5 months. You do not need to do anything to get this service.
You will receive a warning email giving you 28 days to remove (offboard) the contents of your student account (for example, any files and data that you want to keep from your OneDrive account). This email will also explain that your account will transition to an alumni email address.
As part of this transition, you will see your primary email alias change from @soton.ac.uk to @southamptonalumni.ac.uk.
Your new alumni email address will follow the form username@southamptonalumni.ac.uk.
Your alumni email address will be an email account only. This means that:
All your old emails, contacts, sent items and calendar will automatically be migrated to your new alumni account. Your username (in the form username@soton.ac.uk) and password will be the same as it always has been.
You will lose access to your files when your account expires, and these files will be permanently deleted shortly after this.
You will also lose access to the following university systems and the files stored there:
The following Knowledge Base articles will help you move your files and folders from OneDrive:
You will receive a Welcome email from the Office of Development and Alumni Relations (ODAR) when you graduate or leave. This will happen in either September or January and will be the start of your 1-year ongoing email access.
For example, students who graduated in July 2025 will receive the Welcome email in September 2025. They will continue to have full access to their computing account up to November, when they will then transition to an alumni email address until September 2026.
Your alumni username will be the one you had as a student in the form username@soton.ac.uk (for example: ab1c22@soton.ac.uk).
Your password will be the most recent one you used for your student email account.
You will be asked to approve Window’s Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). If you need to reset your password, please contact ServiceLine.
You will still be able to receive and read emails sent on your old student email address. These emails will be redirected to your alumni email address. Emails will continue to be received from both addresses.
The emails sent from your alumni account will be sent from your alumni email address (username@southamptonalumni.ac.uk)
After this 1-year period, you will have the chance to extend your alumni email for another year to September 2027 under our pilot scheme, monitoring the viability to continue to offer this as an ongoing benefit. Please be reassured that this does not affect any of the other benefits open to alumni – from career support, campus library access to discounts on courses. Visit the page "Benefits and offers for alumni" to find out more about these benefits.
Please note, that all accounts must have Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) enabled. If you need help, please see the article ‘How to set up and manage Microsoft Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)’.
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Due to low usage and cyber security concerns, the alumni email service was due to be discontinued at the end of September 2025 however after further consultation, we are now pleased to be able to offer our alumni with existing email account access the opportunity to extend their access until September 2026. There will be a further opportunity to opt in again to September 2027 (as part of a pilot).
An email will be sent at the end of August 2025/beg of Sept 2025 explaining that the alumni email service is not closing and that another email will be sent in November 2025 offering you the chance to opt in.
Please note, that all accounts must have Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) enabled, if you had MFA turned on as a student, your MFA settings stay the same.
If you have opted in, sometime after the 1st January 2026, you will be prompted to set up MFA when you next sign in if you don’t have it enabled. You can continue to use your alumni email account without it until then.
If you do not opt-in, your account will be closed. Please make sure you have moved (offboarded) all your content and changed any subscriptions. For further info, please see our Frequent Asked Questions (FAQs).
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If you need help, please contact ServiceLine or visit one of our Tech Hubs.
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