When a student enrolls at Northeastern, they are provided with a university email address. The format [email protected] has become a staple on campus and the use of the university email is expected for communications with professors, advisors and co-op employers.

Recently, however, students have begun to notice that if you send an email addressed to a student but end with @northeastern.edu instead of @husky.neu.edu, the email will still go through. Northeastern’s Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Cole Camplese said this is due to a recent change in the way the university manages “digital identities.”

Northeastern uses Google for Education, which means that students have access to systems like Gmail and Google Drive while on their university account. In addition, the university also uses Office 365. While faculty and staff have access to Office 365’s email and calendar with their @northeastern.edu email, students can only download free versions of the Microsoft Office applications, such as Word and Powerpoint.

What caused the change is that Information Technology Services created an @northeastern.edu email address for each student in order to add them to the Global Address List, or GAL, which is Office 365’s address lookup feature.

While this is a change, it does not indicate a shift toward eliminating the @husky.neu.edu email addresses, Camplese said. What it does mean is that emails sent to both the normal husky email addresses and the @northeastern.edu email addresses will go through. It is important to note, however, that messages can not be sent from the @northeastern.edu address.