[atoav]

Why would you expect any institution to support all email addresses of their ex-employees ad infinitum?

This would be a security nightmare for them. It is pretty normal for universities to have some sort of identity managmemt system that automatically provisions emails when you are employed there and deprovision them once you are gone.

[acka]

Why not have a system where students and staff have actual email inboxes but alumni have their email forwarded?

Most universities use a portal of some sort for easy access to personal information and preferences anyway, so it shouldn't be too difficult to limit access for alumni to only allow them to change a few personal details like name / address / phone number and the like, plus email forwarding settings. I think the extra cost is negligible compared to what universities already spend on alumni like newsletters, conferences, dinners, etc.

[oefrha]

If I run a university IT system I certainly don’t want someone who possibly attended a program thirty years ago walking around with an apparent affiliation with my institution. I find my institutions’ policies of (IIRC) one year forwarding + permanent alumni email pretty reasonable.

Additionally, making people who want to cold email work a little to acquire the current email address is actually a good thing, especially if they want to talk about something years old. I’ve generally had a lot more pleasant and engaging correspondence with people who worked out my email (say from a side project I develop pseudonymously) than ones who directly lifted my email from my professional profiles. So, expiring emails in papers generally isn’t a real problem anyway, and it’s basically never a hurdle if your target is still in academic circles. It only becomes a problem in this specific context of automated authentication (based on something not intended for that purpose).

[blackenedgem]

An awful lot of free student access programs revolve around the uni email address being accredited. Foe example Jetbrains will give you a full version of their products if you register with a uni email, then require you to verify it yearly.

If you forward emails automatically then you'd lose this accreditation. I suppose the solution would be an accreditatiom domain that forwards to your uni address only, but that's extra work now.

[atoav]

I can't answer for everybody, but my (German) university is prohibited from doing so by law. We are state employees and as such our university needs a comtract with the people runnimg services that process our (or our students) data.

Obviously our university isn't gonna make a 10k€/month contract just because some prof wants their mail forwarded to gmail. Especially not if they are not working here anymore.