University of Southampton

iSolutions

Guidance for students leaving the university or becoming staff

This article gives students instructions about their university IT account whether they are leaving the university or becoming staff.

Students needing something specific not listed within the article can contact their Faculty Student Offices.

If you are not expecting your IT account to close as you are still studying, please contact your School Office in the first instance.

What happens after becoming an Alumni

Alumni email

After the creation of your Alumni account, you can use it to manage your emails and your calendar. Your alumni email will appear as follows: username@southamptonalumni.ac.uk.

All your old emails, contacts, sent items and calendar will automatically be migrated to your new alumni account.

To know more about your alumni account and how to access it, please read the article "How to access your Alumni email account".

There you will find further information about:

  • Alumni account creation
  • Username and password
  • Accessing your email account
  • Sending and receiving emails from your alumni account

Important changes to the alumni email service

Due to data management and cyber security reasons, alumni will no longer have access to any university email address (for example, username@soton.ac.uk or username@southamptonalumni.ac.uk) starting from 01/10/2025.

Alumni will no longer be able to:

  • Send email from your alumni email address
  • Receive and read emails sent to your old student email address. These emails will not be redirected to your alumni email address.

Please note:

  • From 01/10/2025, alumni email accounts will be closed. If you want to keep your data, you will need to move them by 30/09/2025
  • You will be unable to recover any email from your account after this date
  • If you have previously used your alumni email address to sign up to any service, license, or social media, we recommend changing that address to another one

Whilst this information is correct at the time of writing, we are still in consultation regarding ongoing access to email accounts when you become alumni, so this information is subject to change.

If you would like any further information about this change, please visit the page "Decommissioning of Alumni Email Service – Frequently Asked Questions". 

Files and university systems

You typically get 4 months before your account changes to give you a chance to transfer any data you want to keep.

You will receive a warning email 28 days before your account is due to expire.

You will lose access to your files when your account expires, and these files will be permanently deleted shortly after this.

You will lose access to the following university systems and the files stored there:

  • Personal Filestore
  • OneDrive and any Office 365 services
  • Banner
  • SUSSED
  • The University Virtual Private Network (VPN)
  • Eduroam
  • Public Workstations
  • Blackboard
  • eAssignments
  • Efolio
  • PGR Manager
  • GitHub
  • Most other services that require you to authenticate

Extensions to a computing account

Students cannot request extensions to their computing account. However, if you feel you have a strong case for an extension, please raise a request to ServiceLine.

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Qualified students leaving the university

Overview

If you are leaving the University in the Summer of 2025 or after this date, you will no longer be offered an alumni email address. Once you receive your final results, the Student Office marks you as "Qualified". You will continue to get 152 days of access to your email account - ending in xxx@soton.ac.uk before receiving a warning email 28 days before your current account is due to expire (so approximately 5 months, following qualification). This will give you time to remove (offboard) the contents of your accounts if there are files and data that you want to keep. 

Please be reassured that you will still have access to all the other benefits open to alumni – from career support, library access to discounts on courses. Visit the page "Benefits and offers for alumni"  find out more about these benefits.

What do I need to do before my account expires?

Before your account expires and your Alumni account is created, make sure you do the following:

  • Take a copy of any personal files you wish to keep after you leave the university, as these will be deleted after your account expires. This may include files stored on the Filestore, OneDrive, Blackboard, eAssignments - see the "Files" section for more details.
  • Check your security settings in Subscribe, and make sure you have set a secondary contact email address. This can be used to reset your account if you forget your password.

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Not qualified students leaving the university

The following procedure is for students enrolled after 2016. Students enrolled before 2016 need to contact ServiceLine if necessary.

Once the Student Office marks you as "Withdrawn", you will receive a warning email saying that your account is due to expire in 28 days. This happens to give you time to re-organise the content of your account and to transfer any data you want to keep.

28 days after the warning email, your university account will become an Alumni email account.

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Students becoming staff

Staff and student account will always be separate.

As soon as iSolutions activates your staff account, you can request to:

  • Transfer your emails, contacts, and email addresses
  • Have access to the High-Performance Computing facility (IRIDIS)
  • Have access to your Blackboard modules 

How to request the transfer of your student data to your staff account

You can request to move the data listed above the day after you have subscribed to your staff account. What you need to do:

  1. Set up your staff account through Subscribe
  2. Wait for your staff email account to be created. After creating your account, you will have to wait up to 24 hours for all systems and services (email included) to become available 
  3. Request transition from one account to the other filling the form User IT Account Transfer. Please note: the synchronisation process will take up to 24 hours before completing.
  4. Transfer files and content from your old IT account to your new account, please read the knowledge base article "Uploading files or folders from your local storage to OneDrive".
    If you are using a computer managed by iSolutions and the instructions listed in the article "Uploading files or folders from your local storage to OneDrive" don't work please read the article "Moving Filestore from one account to another".

You can also create an automatic email forwarding by creating a rule in Outlook. If you need guidance, please read the Microsoft article "Use inbox rules in Outlook.com".

Postgraduate Research Students (PGRs) that had previously access to a Research or Resource filestore can request access to the same filestore using one of the following forms:

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Guidance for Postgraduate Research students (PGRs)

PGRs who are leaving having been awarded a doctorate / Mphil

There is further consultation ongoing during the summer of 2025 as to current PGRs alumni email status.

If you have been an undergraduate or postgraduate taught student at the University previously and taken a break between studies; any previous alumni accounts that you may have (ending xxx@southamptonalumni.ac.uk) will be discontinued from 01/10/2025.  

If you would like any further information about this change, please visit the page "Decommissioning of Alumni Email Service – Frequently Asked Questions". 

PGRs who are becoming staff

Staff and student accounts will always be separate.

As soon as iSolutions activates your staff account, you can request to:

  • Transfer your emails, contacts, and email addresses
  • Have access to the High-Performance Computing facility (IRIDIS)
  • Have access to your Blackboard modules 

If you have been an undergraduate or postgraduate taught student at the University previously and taken a break between studies; any previous alumni accounts that you may have (ending xxx@southamptonalumni.ac.uk) will be discontinued from 01/10/2025. 

If you would like any further information about this change, please visit the page "Decommissioning of Alumni Email Service – Frequently Asked Questions". 

If you have studied here in any capacity without a break, you will not have any alumni accounts as your various accounts will have been transferred over.

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Getting IT help

If you need help, please contact ServiceLine or visit one of our Tech Hubs.

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Related content

Staff resources

How to access your Alumni email account

Requesting an extension to a computing account

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