Email Forwarding

CUIT allows you to forward your Columbia email to another address, with some limitations for security and reliability. Remember: Your email alias delivers mail to the same place as [email protected]. You should never forward your email to your email alias!

As of February 4, 2025, Automatic Email Forwarding outside of Columbia's approved domains has been discontinued.

Email has evolved significantly since Columbia University introduced these services. To ensure smooth operations and to keep pace with technological advancements, we have periodically updated our services. As the landscape of digital communication continues to shift, we are making changes to our email services to maintain the quality and security you expect.

Email Forwarding Domains

Forwarding from [email protected] is permitted for email addresses in the following domains. However, CUIT recommends that you have emails sent directly to these email addresses rather than forwarding to maximize the reliability of email delivery. For example, have your emails sent directly to [email protected] rather forwarding from [email protected].

  • adcu.columbia.edu
  • alumni.gsb.columbia.edu
  • barnard.edu
  • berkeley.columbia.edu
  • caa.columbia.edu
  • c2b2.columbia.edu
  • ciesin.columbia.edu
  • columbia-imc.org
  • columbia.london.edu
  • columbiauniversitypress.com
  • cumc.columbia.edu
  • facil.columbia.edu
  • facilities.onmicrosoft.com
  • gsb.columbia.edu
  • hku.columbia.london.edu
  • icg.cpmc.columbia.edu
  • iri.columbia.edu
  • ldeo.columbia.edu
  • london.columbia.edu
  • math.columbia.edu
  • nevis.columbia.edu
  • nyp.org
  • nyspi.columbia.edu
  • psych.columbia.edu
  • sipa.columbia.edu
  • stat.columbia.edu
  • tc.columbia.edu
  • theschool.columbia.edu
  • uts.columbia.edu
  • utsnyc.edu

FAQ

Historically, Columbia University has provided lifetime email forwarding for alumni and retirees. As third-party service providers - including but not limited to Gmail, Spectrum, Yahoo!, Apple, and others - have tightened email security controls, more and more of these forwarded email messages are not being delivered to recipients.  It’s also affecting Columbia's ability to directly send emails as more of the forwarded emails are looked at as spam by third party providers.  Because of these external issues causing major deliverability issues, lifetime email forwarding service was discontinued on February 4th, 2025.

This change means that emails sent to a [email protected] email accounts will no longer be automatically forwarded to outside third-party accounts after February 4th, 2025. It will only deliver to your Columbia email mailbox.

If you are a Barnard alum
  1. Barnard alumnae have access to Columbia Alumni Association benefits and services, including a CAA email address. To receive these benefits please complete this application form. 
  2. Forward your UNI to your CAA account (this is allowed because you are forwarding to an internal Columbia-affiliated email system).
  3. Check your CAA account periodically to check any email sent to your [email protected] email.
If you are a Teachers College alum
  1. If you don't have a TC Gmail address, follow the steps to activate your TC Gmail account or contact Teachers College Alumni Relations at 212-678-3215 to set yours up.
  2. Forward your UNI to your @tc.columbia.edu account (this is allowed because you are forwarding to an internal Columbia email-affiliated system).
  3. Check your TC account periodically to check any email sent to your [email protected] email.
All other alums
  1. Open up a service request with the CUIT Service Desk.
  2. Ask to discuss your options with the Email Systems Team.

Automatic Email Forwarding outside of Columbia's approved domains was discontinued on February, 4th 2025.

"Missing" emails like this are an unfortunate result of security measures that many companies use to prevent scammers from spoofing email from their addresses. This practice was begun by financial institutions, but is now used widely, including by some general email services like Yahoo and AOL. These measures ask that email be rejected unless it comes directly from the company’s authorized servers. Many email providers including Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL, honor the request as email comes in for their users. In these cases, when columbia.edu tries to re-send email based on your UNI Mail Forwarding setup in Manage My UNI, it fails. This security feature cannot be overridden by Columbia.

As a result, Columbia is disallowing the ability to forward your [email protected] to external email systems. The option to create new forwarding to email systems outside the University was removed. Existing forwarding will continue to function for the foreseeable future until an expiration date is set. UNI mail-forwarding to Columbia systems (Ex. [email protected] to [email protected] or [email protected]) will continue to be available.

If you currently use UNI Mail Forwarding -- or are unsure if your forwarding setup is allowed -- please refer to the table above or contact the CUIT Service Desk at (212) 854-1919.

 

No. You can always forward individual emails externally, we are only discontinuing the automatic forwarding.

No, if your UNI ab1234 is currently configured to deliver email to your custom email domain alias (e.g., [email protected]), this change does not affect that. This is because it's not external email forwarding.