Alumni Gmail Accounts

Trinity University Alumni Gmail is an email account within a Trinity owned domain (alum.trinity.edu), but is administered and maintained by Google, Inc. through their Gmail system.

All @trinity.edu email accounts assigned to users who are currently Trinity University alumni will become @alum.trinity.edu Gmail accounts effective June 1, 2007. Graduating seniors will keep their @trinity.edu accounts for six months after graduation. After six months, these accounts will also become @alum.trinity.edu Gmail accounts.

Due to the increasing maintenance, back-up and archiving costs of the campus email servers, along with new legal concerns regarding data retention, Trinity University is simply unable to provide alumni with an email account on campus email servers on a continual basis after graduation.

No problem. Just let us know by sending an email to alumni@alum.trinity.edu and telling us in the body of the email that you do not wish to have a Trinity University Alumni Gmail account. Of course, even if we set one up for you, you are under no obligation to use it.

I've heard that Google scans the text in emails of Gmail accounts. Is that true?

Well, yes, but probably not in the way you might be thinking. Google does use software or a “bot” to scan Gmail emails for key words for the purposes of targeted advertising. Google then places small, unobtrusive, and relevant text ads alongside your Gmail messages, similar to those on the side of Google search results pages. The matching of ads to content is a completely automated process performed by computers. No humans read your email to target the ads, and no email content or other personally identifiable information is ever provided to advertisers.

I will graduate soon. How long, after I graduate, will I still have access to my trinity.edu account?

Six months. Regardless of when you graduate, you will have access to your trinity.edu email account for six months after your graduation day.

To forward email from your @trinity.edu account on an ongoing basis would require that account to be maintained and Trinity is unable to do that. (See FAQ - Why will my account become a Gmail account?) For ITS to perform a one-time forwarding of all the message currently in your inbox is also not possible. This would be an extremely laborious task, since a forwarding address would have to be manually entered for every email account of every graduating senior.

I want to keep some of my email messages from my old account. What should I do?

There are a couple of options for holding on to messages from your @trinity.edu account. Bear in mind that any of these steps must be taken BEFORE your @trinity.edu account closure date. Once your @trinity.edu account has been closed, all email within that original account is lost. Suggestions for keeping old messages:

Save email messages you wish to keep to your hard drive as txt or htm files (depending on whether the email message was text or html). You can do this by opening the message and choosing: FILE > SAVE AS.
Forward email messages you wish to keep to an alternate email account (e.g., Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc.)

If you are using Outlook, you can export the entire Contacts list as a csv file and then import it directly into your new Trinity Alumni Gmail account. Bear in mind that the export must be performed BEFORE your account is transferred to Gmail. We have created a video tutorial to show you how to export and then import your contacts. Video Tutorial Page

How do I forward incoming messages to my new Trinity Alumni Gmail account to another email account I have?

Your Trinity Alumni Gmail account lets you automatically forward incoming mail to another address, if you'd like.
Here's how to forward messages automatically:

Log in to your Trinity Alumni Gmail account.
Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
Click Forwarding and POP along the top of the Mail Settings box.
Enter the email address to which you'd like your messages forwarded.
Select the action you'd like your messages to take from the drop-down menu. You can choose to keep Gmail's copy of the message in your inbox, or you can send it automatically to All Mail or Trash.
Click Save Changes.

As of 4/12/2007, Gmail offers 2.8 GB of storage space. However, Google is constantly increasing the amount of storage space available in Gmail. You can expect that number to steadily increase over time.

Where can I find Google's terms and conditions or the privacy policy for Gmail users?

Trinity University has partnered with Google through a service called Google Apps for Your Domain. Trinity University owns the domain alum.trinity.edu and Google administers email for that domain through Gmail. The difference for you is that you get the convenience and storage of a Gmail account along with the email address of an official Trinity owned domain.

Why is the first part of my new @alum.trinity.edu Gmail address different than my old @trinity.edu address? (For example: john.smith@trinity.edu is now jsmith2@alum.trinity.edu instead of john.smith@alum.trinity.edu)

Current Trinity student, faculty and staff email (@trinity.edu) accounts are maintained on several Microsoft Exchange servers. These Exchange servers provide the ability to do what is known as "email aliasing" with these accounts. This means that, as a student, though you may not have known it, you actually had at least two email addresses that were capable of receiving mail in the same email account. A student named John Smith could have received email sent to john.smith@trinity.edu or jsmith@trinity.edu.

Google Gmail accounts do not allow email aliasing. The format used is usually the first letter of your first name, followed by your last name. In cases where there are mutiple people with same first initial and last name, a number is also assigned. (e.g. jsmith2@alum.trinity.edu)

Frequently Asked Questions

When will my account become a Gmail account?