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.

🚫  Why Email Forwarding Can Be Unreliable

When emails are forwarded, especially from .gov or other domains with strict DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) policies—authentication checks like SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) can fail. This happens because:

  • SPF often breaks during forwarding since the forwarding server’s IP address isn’t authorized by the original sender’s domain.
  • DKIM can also fail if the message is altered in transit (e.g., headers or content modified).
  • DMARC alignment fails when either SPF or DKIM doesn’t pass, and the domain in the From headers that don’t match the authenticated domain

✅  Best Practices to Avoid Forwarding Pitfalls

  1. Use the Mailbox You Actually Read instead of using forwarding [email protected] to another inbox; configure and use the mailbox directly. This ensures full authentication and delivery reliability
  2. Avoid Using Forwarding for Critical Communications, especially for receiving messages from .gov, banks or other high-security senders, direct delivery to the intended mailbox is the safest route.
  3. Only rely on [email protected] forwarding for emailing Columbia to Columbia email addresses.

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 them to maximize the reliability of email delivery. For example, have your emails sent directly to [email protected] rather than forwarding from [email protected].

  • adcu.columbia.edu
  • caa.columbia.edu
  • stat.columbia.edu

 

The destinations below are not managed or supported by the CUIT email team for mail delivery. Our team does not have administrative control over these systems, nor can we troubleshoot issues related to their configuration or performance. If you experience any problems with email delivery to these destinations, such as delays, bounced messages, or connectivity errors, please reach out directly to the IT support teams responsible for those systems. They are best equipped to investigate and resolve issues within their respective environments.

For clarity:

  • CUIT ensures proper delivery from our side, but once messages leave our managed infrastructure, responsibility shifts to the destination system’s administrators.

  • Any adjustments, troubleshooting, or escalations for those systems must be handled by their designated support teams.

     

  • alumni.gsb.columbia.edu
  • barnard.edu
  • berkeley.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
  • 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.