All students are provisioned with a mailbox while they attend S&T and to ease student life the mailbox is kept for 12 months after enrollment, but at some point it is deprovisioned and the mailbox is gone. Can’t you just get that back?
Whether it is with Google, Microsoft, Apple, or some other provider there are many email offerings that will provide you with a mailbox for as long as you maintain an account with them. The University provides email in order to facilitate communication between students, faculty and staff. Doing so has a cost not only in licensing fees that are paid but in providing support and security for them. The more accounts that are maintained the greater these costs are.
Students have the greatest leeway with retaining their mailboxes as they are automatically kept for up to 12 months following the last semester attended and can even be granted (once) an extra 12 month extension. This is done, despite the costs and risks associated with maintaining the mailboxes, in order to accommodate students who are unable to attend every semester and may need a longer than usual break. But there still has to be a limit and when that limit is reached the mailbox is deprovisioned.
Once a mailbox has been deprovisioned it is gone. The email and calendar events associated with it become unrecoverable. Mailboxes are provisioned and deprovisioned based on their lifecycle, not on requests. The only exceptions are those already identified: the automatic 12 month after last attendance and the (one time) 12 month extensions.
But I Had Important Emails!
Those are unrecoverable. As described below multiple notices are sent before an account is deprovisioned. Any important emails needed to be saved elsewhere before the mailbox was removed.
But I Just Need It To Send or Receive Email For a Short While!
No additional exceptions are possible. As described below multiple notices are sent before an account is deprovisioned. Any external account or service that was tied to the mailbox needed to be transitioned to a different email before the University provided mailbox was removed.
But I Didn’t Get My 12 Months!
Deprovisioning Process
Mailboxes are deprovisioned based on their eligibility. For former students this is determined as follows:
- Student accounts will be locked 12 months from the end of the last term enrolled. Former students will receive an email in their University mailbox giving them notice when the 12 months is almost up.
- Locked accounts will have all content deleted 21 days after the lock date.
- After the 12 months grace period, students can request a one-time one year extension for reasons associated with continuation of their degree program; to facilitate job searches; or for other reasons as documented in the online request form. Former students receive this request form near the end of their 12 month grace period. The form cannot be completed in advance.
- Students who have been granted an extension must:
- Abide by UM email policy 12006.
- Complete the UM Annual Information Security training module.
- The determination of account eligibility for employees who are former students (not currently enrolled or admitted for a future semester) will be based on their employment status, not their former student status.