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Alumni and former students to lose access to WVU MIX accounts three years after end of last term

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Effective Jan. 1, 2023, alumni and former students will lose access to their WVU-issued MIX (Gmail) accounts three years after the end of the last term they were enrolled. This change is necessary because Google is no longer providing free unlimited storage to universities and WVU is currently more than four times over its new data storage limit.  

Former students who decide to reenroll at WVU will be issued a new account with the same username they have now. The new account won’t contain any of their old data and will be subject to any other standards that may be in place at that time. For more details, review this article. 

WVU has long provided MIX accounts to former students as a courtesy, without expiration, and the number of accounts now exceeds 193,000. More than 60% of those accounts have not been accessed for more than a year.

To reduce the risk of a compromised account and to prevent unanticipated costs with data storage, WVU will limit University-issued Google accounts to: admitted or currently enrolled students, faculty and instructors, advisors with a faculty role, instructional support technicians, Google Workspace account managers, support staff and administrators. Employees without these roles should use University-issued Microsoft 365 accounts.  

You can find information about Outlook email, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams for collaboration at it.wvu.edu/help. Health Sciences Center employees must use the HSC instance of Microsoft 365 

ITS strongly encourages the use of Microsoft Teams for collaboration. Each team is linked to an Office 365 group, and all groups include a secure SharePoint site where you can securely store and work on documents with other members of your team. If you’re new to using Teams, you may want to review this FAQ.