Sandip Rai
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A student email account means perks and deals. A free 6-month Amazon Prime membership. Fifty-percent discounts on Spotify, Hulu and Apple Music. One terabyte of Microsoft OneDrive storage. Free GitHub for student software developers.
A .edu email address is certainly a doorway to savings.
The university gives us Outlook to access our student email account. With its clean interface on the web and mobile apps, Outlook stands alongside Gmail as the top email services.
But as our college days come to a close, so do our student email accounts.
Unlike free email services like Gmail and Yahoo, students only get access to the university-provided Microsoft Outlook email and its services for a certain period after graduation.
A lot of students use their student email as their primary email for communication and other services throughout their college years. Losing access to your metrostate.edu account means losing all those years of valuable emails and conversations.
That’s a difficult reality.
University policy 1050 governs email use, including how long student email accounts remain active.
According to Sara Solland, director of IT Services, that policy is currently under review.
As it stands now, new students can access their email account for one year after being admitted to Metro State—even if they don’t enroll in a class.
Students who have taken a class can access email for three years after their last semester.
“The best thing students can do to prepare for moving away from their Metropolitan State email account is to make sure to do so prior to the three-year mark after their last active semester,” Solland said in an email.
She said the university will alert students if the email policy is updated or changed.
Metro State’s policy is in the middle ground compared to other universities. St. Cloud State University deactivates student email starting nine months after graduation and deletes them after a year.
But the University of Minnesota? It offers students access to their email account forever.
Wouldn’t that be nice for Metro State?
Microsoft offers an easy way to export all your emails. They can then be imported to other email services.
Using the Outlook app on your computer, go to File > Open & Export > Import/Export > Export to a file > Outlook Data File (.pst) / CSV.
You can export your emails exported in either a .pst or CSV (comma separated values) format.
The .pst format is the better option as it is simpler to import into another Outlook app or other email service.
Have you used your student email as your login on any websites? Be sure to change your preferred login email ID to a different email on those sites and services. You don’t want to get locked out after you lose access to your student email.
