BLUF or TL/DR: Harvard will begin rolling out a new 3rd party email forwarding system in the summer, starting with the classes of 21/22 and 23 - undergraduate and graduate. The system has been thoroughly vetted and they are in final contract negotiations. Email addresses will not change and alums should see no change other than more reliable forwarding starting in the fall. An initial communication will go out to all in late April.

Present in the meeting:

• Sarah Karmon, HAA Executive Director
• Siovhan O’Connor, Associate VP and COO, Alumni Affairs and Development
• Erica Bradshaw - interim CTO
• Charlotte Moore - project manager for email forwarding
• Julie Broad, Executive Director, Advancement Solutions 
• Colin Kegler ’97 (current HAA Director)
• Prashanth Kumar ‘21
• David Huang ‘97
• Helen Fairman ’91

Technology status:

• The past couple of months have been spent in discovery among existing solutions for email forwarding
• Found a great outsourcing vendor: they have been in business 10 years, they forward millions of emails a day for corporations and non-profits - specialty in email services. They work internationally so they are familiar with GDPR and privacy laws in different countries. Harvard has also completed a security assessment of the vendor.
  
  • They can offer new approaches to how email is forwarded. They work with gmail and other ISPs to ensure deliverability by adding a digital signature. 
  • Harvard is currently in contract negotiations and technical conversations with them
  • Developers at HUIT are working to do the necessary preparation work to enable the solution
  • This solution is financially feasible for the long term
• Alumni will keep existing email aliases - Harvard will send all of the info to them
  • They are able to give a better understanding of and better transparency around deliverability
  • They are working on new features which we may adopt over time (sounds like a SAAS solution)
  • Compared to their corporate clients we are really small. HAA/HUIT did a reference call with a realty corporation for whom they are forwarding a massive volume of email.
  • This would still be Harvard’s domain, not mixed with other clients according to all of Harvard’s security protocols.
    • We have their old SOC2 protocol (undergoing evaluation for this year’s certification and then Harvard will have their updated protocol)
    • Harvard is handling sign-on, would handle 2FA if that became relevant, etc.
  • This solves all legal concerns: the vendor will not store emails but will have email subject lines, senders and recipients, delivery status
  • HAA will not offer fully functional email inboxes, due to the previous legal concerns.

Implementation/roll out planning: 

• 3 phases: 
  • Phase 1a: onboarding degree holding alumni from 2021, 2022 based on actual graduation date regardless of what class they choose to affiliate with, both undergraduates and graduate students - starting this summer (alumni.harvard.edu addresses)
  • Phase 1b: class of 2023 - they will still have their student addresses for a year after graduation - they will also move to alumni email addresses this summer - note that student email and alumni email are two separate services but HUIT does support them in transitioning from student inbox to alumni inbox
  • Phase 2: transitioning current alumni forwarding users onto the new technology - little to no impact to users, will all happen in the back end - Fall September-ish assuming all goes well - no sign up or verification process
  • Phase 3: opening it up to alumni who have never claimed email forwarding and might want to - early 2024 - requires some changes to re-open the service (right now no one can sign up for a new address - shut off in May 2021)

Communication:

• HAA will communicate that it’s coming in latter half of April (assuming contract has been signed) to everyone who has email forwarding as well as university-wide classes of ’21-’23, plus alumni volunteers so they have info if asked, also update website language and FAQs
• Right after Commencement/Alumni Day specific communication with 2021/2022 and 2023 about what’s coming and when, what they will need to do, FAQs, workflows
• Phase 2 people will later get a similar communication letting them know that the change will be happening imminently (presumably in late summer)

Other comments/questions:

• The current system is working a bit better recently. Erica Bradshaw and team put in new spam filter which dramatically improved flow through current forwarding servers.
• A request: please investigate interoperability with other programs like Zoom
• HUIT email service team may now be able to be proactive in letting us know if an alum email has an issue - Harvard service will continue to offer support to alums (not the new vendor - HUIT can escalate issues to vendor and will interact with them).
• We will be able to review the April communication before it goes out

Again, great thanks and appreciation to Helen Fairman for taking these meeting notes and writing this summary of our meeting with Harvard and HAA! We believe Harvard is on the right road to fulfilling their promise to us of email for life! We look forward to seeing this thru to the end!