Due to evolving cybersecurity threats, coupled with Google's decision to no longer offer unlimited data storage to universities at no cost, Hamline is no longer able to provide perpetual access to Google accounts for alumni.  

Hamline-issued Google account service for students who will graduate as part of the Class of 2025 will end January 12, 2026.

Access for alumni who graduated as the Class of 2024 ended on January 7, 2025 . As of that date emails, documents, and other data associated with those accounts were rendered inaccessible. Offboarding of all remaining alumni accounts, for all 2023 & earlier alumni, occurred in 2024.

We encourage all alumni account holders to begin migrating important information to a personal, non-Hamline account. This site outlines recommended action for transitioning to other account services.

This is a complicated answer that revolves around three key issues that are all somewhat related: security, support, and cost. 

Insurance providers, financial auditors, government regulators, and vendors, such as Google, understand the risks incurred when maintaining a large population of accounts associated with former students and employees. These partners are reluctant to allow institutions, like ours, to continue tolerating these risks. As a consequence, cyber insurance premium costs are skyrocketing. Many insurance carriers are ceasing offering coverage to some colleges and universities because the carriers have deemed that cybersecurity threats are rapidly outpacing institutions' ability to mitigate these risks. New threats and vulnerabilities are continually emerging. All evidence points toward these trends continuing.

Providing support to thousands of accounts for alumni, even if these accounts are rarely used, requires staff time to administer. When an account breach is suspected, the expenditure of time and resources required to deal with these events can easily balloon exponentially. In today’s increasingly problematic cybersecurity environment, it’s easy to envision how this situation could quickly spiral out of control.

For over a decade Google has provided unlimited account and data storage at no additional cost to higher education customers who contract to receive the Google Enterprise for Education suite of services. As a Google Enterprise for Education customer, Hamline has benefited financially from this no-fee-for-storage arrangement with Google. However, Google has announced it will begin charging the university various storage quota fees beginning in April 2024.

With all of the risks, support requirements, and financial cost inherent with the maintenance of these accounts now provided to alumni, ITS has recommended to university leadership that Hamline follow the example set by many of our fellow institutions of higher learning and pursue an account reduction strategy.

Depending on how much you used your Hamline account, you may need to do little to nothing, or you may need to transfer emails and documents to a new non-Hamline account and alert your contacts of the impending change. We provide some helpful tips for making this transition below.  If you graduated sometime since December 2022, your transition should have been completed by January 5, 2024. At that time your account became inaccessible, and your access to emails, documents, and other data ended. Offboarding of all remaining pre-2023 alumni accounts will occur on June 4, 2024.

• Choose a reliable and secure email provider. We recommend Google Gmail, but Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo Mail are also popular free options.

• Create your new account using your chosen email provider.

• Forward/share important messages and documents to your new email address.

  • We recommend using Google Takeout to export a copy of your data. 

  • Here is an article on how to Export Google Mail & Data Using Google Takeout

• As an alternative to Google Takeout, VaultMe offers a for fee account migration service. Fees vary depending up the amount of data you wish to migrate. Current fee structures for migration from an .EDU account are: $12.99 plus data fees of $0.20 per GB migrated and $0.20 per 1,000 items migrated.

• Create a vacation message at least a month prior to January 5, 2024 on your expiring Hamline account that directs people to your new address.  After your account has been shut down (6/4/24 for pre-2023 alumni, 1/5/25 for the Class of 2024), and any emails will be rejected with a generic “Account Disabled” error, even if you set up an autoreply.

• Email your important contacts to notify them of your new email address.

• Update any online accounts that use your old email address, including Workday.

• Notify the Hamline Alumni Relations Office of your preferred email address for ongoing communications with the university. You can accomplish that task by using this form or by contacting the office directly at alum@hamline.edu or (651) 523-2015 if you need assistance.