It’ll be painful, but I recommend moving away from that .edu address. Universities are notorious for causing headaches for grads trying to access their .edu addresses in the long run. Register your own domain, create an email under that domain, then use whatever email client you choose.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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Worked in UK universities as an Enterprise Architect. Can confirm you can't rely on those email addresses. It is a gift most Unis provide to graduates, but they're not obligated to maintain it, or fix it when it goes wrong.
As per above, register your own domain name (I use my own full name .co.uk). This allows me to have lots of email addresses for (shopping@ work@ games@ amazon@ etc etc). Also, if the email host gets too expensive, does something you don't like, or just cuts you off, you can point your domain name to another host and pick up from there. Obviously it is a good idea to keep a local backup of your emails (thunderbird or outlook) just in case.
The difference would be trivial since the mail would still be going through and sitting on Google's servers. Client has to fetch it from some server and your university using Gmail means they've already outsourced the whole email system to Google.
I'd take u/anticonnor's advice and gradually move services and correspondence to your new mail provider. Several years back, Google flooded the education market with cheap cloud services and "unlimited" storage. Then a couple years ago, they started charging huge premiums on storage use above a certain limit, leading to mass data deletions and the discontinuation of alumni email among many universities. Who knows when they'll pull the rug again.
I still use my .edu 15 years later and it still works. I just dont want to deal with the headache of managing a domain, paying for it, switching hosting providers, etc. The edu address has always worked fine.
My university uses outlook and I use Thunderbird to access it. I would look into that. If you are worried about it being gmail and the privacy implications, I would say privacy doesnt really exist in email anyways. Any email you receive probably bounced through either a gmail or exchange server on the way to you anyways.
2 things to make this easier:
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No need to manage domain, hosting providers. Just get privacy-first mail provider (like Proton or something).
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No need to big-bang it. Just start connecting new accounts to the new email instead of Googles. Then once in while change them for existing services (retail for example and government) one by one.
Then after 2 years or so you will notice a couple of old ones are from obsolete services or can be changed to finish it off.
Ya I mean I have a proton account as well. I was mainly just pointing out that privacy in email is kind of silly to be worrying about. Your bank if not encrypting the emails they send and its pretty much guaranteed they are relaying it through an exchange or gmail server. I appreciate what proton is doing but Google and Mircosoft are getting your data either way.
My strategy has been to just not use email for much of anything beyond what is required for my life to function. Which really isnt much.
If you are worried about it being gmail and the privacy implications, I would say privacy doesnt really exist in email anyways. Any email you receive probably bounced through either a gmail or exchange server on the way to you anyways.
When both sender and receiver uses encryption, it exists.
Absolutely. But sadly hardly anyone does.