We just received this update from Sarah Karmon, Associate Vice President and Executive Director of the Harvard Alumni Association:

"I hope you have had a good start to 2024. I know that I write at a time of challenge for our University and a time when many in our campus and alumni community are hurting and concerned. That said, I did want to keep you updated on our progress on email forwarding which has moved apace during this time.

We will be migrating all email forwarding users into our new and improved email forwarding platform by January 30 of this year. We will begin messaging users about this next step tomorrow, January 17, and going through next Wednesday. As there are 135,000 alumni in this group, we will send messages on a rolling basis. There is nothing users need to do to prepare for this migration— they will be able to keep their email forwarding address in its current form and can continue to make updates to it through the Alumni Directory. We are emailing them to close the loop and let them know that this migration should result in a much better email forwarding experience.

We are working through plans and timing on when to open the service widely to all other alumni. As a reminder, degree-holding alumni in the classes of 2021, 2022, and 2023 were granted access to email forwarding this summer."

Sarah also let us know that "our recent graduates who set up email forwarding have seen very few, if any, issues with the new service. We’re also currently seeing more than 20,000 messages transfer daily through the new service with strong deliverability rates."

Sounds like a largely successful pilot - keeping fingers crossed that the next phase goes as smoothly!