Starting in January 2020, Northeastern will begin to move away from student email accounts with “Husky” in the address. The “@husky.neu.edu” domain is being phased out in favor of “@northeastern.edu.” 

The aesthetic change accompanies a more technically significant one: Student email accounts will migrate to Office 365, and will be accessed through Microsoft Outlook instead of Gmail, according to an email sent to students Monday from Cole Camplese, vice president for information technology at Northeastern.

Northeastern students currently have access to a suite of Google products, including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar and Google Contacts. After the change takes effect, students will use two entirely different digital ecosystems. Mail, contacts and calendar will be hosted by Office 365, while Google Drive will still be available through Google.

To ease the mail transition, emails sent to old “Husky” email addresses will be automatically forwarded to the new addresses starting in January 2020. While the old Google inboxes will be available to students during the transition, Monday’s announcement indicated that they will be phased out “by fall 2020.”

The new inboxes can be accessed “through a web browser, the Outlook app on your computer or mobile device, or other modern email clients,” per Monday’s announcement.

The announcement message put the highest emphasis on the cosmetic change of “@northeastern.edu.” 

“Students from across the university have consistently expressed their desire for a more professional and recognizable email account for communicating with potential employers, academic associations, and other parties outside of Northeastern,” Camplese wrote. 

These changes have been foreshadowed more than once during the past year. During a Student Government Association town hall in October, President Chris Brown mentioned a planned meeting with Information Technology Services to discuss the possibility of a move to Microsoft. 

In January, The News reported that Northeastern created a Microsoft “@northeastern.edu” address for each student in order to add them to the university’s address lookup system. At the time, Camplese said that move did not indicate a shift toward eliminating “Husky” email addresses.