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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

> validate against a common list of valid universities

Considering that many universities provide email addresses to alumni, I don't think that heuristic would work either.

Do they? The institutions I've worked with shut off e-mail access between 6 months and 1 year after a student is no longer active.

I wonder what the benefit is.

The benefit is that it makes it easier to hit them up for donations.

I'm not sure how common it is, but my wife has an edu email address despite being well over twenty years from graduation.

I still get the occasional email to mine inviting me to student events. Not sure they realize I graduated, but it was long enough ago that some of the buildings the events are held in didn't exist when I attended.

I distinctly remember that Freshman year, we were told in some big auditorium, during onboarding, that we should start using our university-provided emails as our primary "professional" emails.

Someone then asked what happens when we graduate and lose access to those emails, and they didn't have a particularly good answer.

I think that was also the same onboarding where they passed around a piece of paper for us to sign in with our name and social security number.

Despite originally saying it was a perk of graduation, mine ended cutting access after 10 years by citing cost saving (I imagine Google Workspace bills add up quickly, compared to self-hosting email). I wouldn't be surprised if this is the trend now.

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