Overview
This page summarizes what happens to your email and other online services after you leave Stanford. You may have found your way here because you received notification that your SUNet ID account will soon close. This means different things depending on your current affiliation with the university (e.g., student, faculty, staff) and your current or expected future eligibility. This page helps you determine what "your account is closing" means to you, and what you need to do.
Depending upon your Stanford affiliation, your SUNet ID account services may change or end when you leave the university; see Account expiration and grace period, below.
To learn more about access to electronic information, see the Stanford Administrative Guide Section 6.1.1 Privacy and Access to Electronic Information.
Account expiration and grace period
| Faculty | When your affiliation with Stanford ends, your SUNet account enters a 120-day grace period which bridges you between the end of one academic year and the start of the next. If, at the end of this grace period, your affiliation has not been reactivated (i.e., you have left the university), your SUNet services end. |
|---|---|
| Staff |
Access to @stanford email and other online services ends on the last day of your employment. This includes access to those Stanford business systems for which your SUNet ID served as login ID (e.g., Axess, Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft Student Administration). If you need copies of personal email or files, be sure to make them in advance. You should change ownership of any Box, Google, and Microsoft 365 documents that others may need access to after your employment ends. |
| Sponsored staff |
If your SUNet account is sponsored (i.e., someone in the university has agreed to pay for you to use SUNet services for a fixed period of time) your sponsored services end when your sponsorship ends. You will receive email reminders 30 and 7 days before the expiration date of your sponsorship; use that time to either get your sponsorship renewed or to close your account. |
| Emeritus faculty and staff | You receive ongoing, full-service SUNet ID accounts. No action is required. |
Emeritus faculty and staff
As an emeritus faculty or staff member, you will keep your SUNet ID and associated @stanford.edu email account. You may choose to take the following actions with your email account.
- Forward your @stanford.edu email to another permanent email address, e.g., Gmail. Note that you do not need to set up forwarding for alumni email; it is forwarded automatically.
- Log into StanfordYou, and select Change settings for account....
- Select the Email tab and then click Forward email.
- Follow the instructions to enter and save the email address(es) to which you want your @stanford.edu mail forwarded.
- Set an autoreply message to inform senders of your new email address.
- Log into StanfordYou, and select Change settings for account....
- Select the Email tab and then click Manage autoreply.
- Follow the steps to turn autoreply on, and write a message that includes your new email address. You do not need to set an expiration date, as the autoreply will end when forwarding ends (see the table, above).
- Save your stored email
- If you use a desktop email client (e.g., Apple Mail or Outlook), you need to create local folders, then copy all of your email and attachments into the local folders. To check this, set your email client to work offline and then make sure you can still get to all your email and attachments. If you can't see your messages and attachments offline, refer to your email program's documentation for how to change the caching setting.
- If you use Webmail, you will have to install a desktop client (e.g., Apple Mail or Outlook). Create local folders and then copy all of your email and attachments into the local folders.
- If you use Mutt or Alpine, your email is stored in the ~/Mail folder there. Use OpenAFS for Stanford to mount your AFS home folder, then either use a desktop email client (e.g., Apple Mail or Outlook) to import the email from the ~/Mail folder, or just copy the files to your local computer's hard drive. If you don't have OpenAFS installed, use an SFTP client such as SecureFX (Windows) or Fetch (Mac) to transfer the files.
If you have questions, please submit a Help ticket.
Move files and close websites
Move your files from your AFS space
Use OpenAFS for Stanford to mount your home folder, and copy the files from your home folder to your hard drive. If you don't have OpenAFS installed, use an SFTP client such as SecureFX (Windows) or Fetch (Mac) to transfer the files.
Close your AFS website
If you've put a personal website at your web.stanford.edu/~sunetid address, you may want to use the grace period to redirect people to another web site. You can do this just by placing a link to your new site on your Stanford site's home page, or by using this <head> tag:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;URL=www.mynewsite.com">
This will cause most browsers to automatically display the specified URL after a delay of 5 seconds (or any number of seconds you specify).
Your website files are stored in the /WWW folder of your AFS home folder. Use OpenAFS for Stanford to mount your home folder, and copy the files from your home folder to your hard drive. If you don't have OpenAFS installed, use an SFTP client such as SecureFX (Windows) or Fetch (Mac) to transfer the files.
Close your Stanford Sites website
To remove your personal website at people.stanford.edu/sunetid, submit a Help ticket. You have the option of requesting an offline archive of your website.
