Academia moves. Your email shouldn't.

About the project

ScholarMail provides researchers with a permanent academic email address that stays with them throughout and beyond their career — independent of changing institutional affiliations and variable IT department policies.

Most researchers publish using university-issued email addresses that expire when they change institution or transition to non-academic sectors. This can result in broken correspondence links in publications, lost collaboration opportunities, and outdated contact details on CVs, profiles, and elsewhere. In modern academia, your email address is a fundamental part of your identity — and it shouldn’t disappear because of circumstances outside of your control.

ScholarMail solves this by offering a persistent, professional forwarding address (e.g., firstname.lastname@scholarmail.org) that routes mail to your current email of choice. If you move institution or update your personal address, you simply change your forwarding destination — without having to update email addresses across your published work and other academic outputs, online profiles, CV, and other professional materials.

It is, and always will be, free to use and run as a public-benefit, non-commercial project by the academic community, for the academic community.

Having an email that's actually yours matters

A persistent, lifelong scholarly email benefits:

✓  Publications & reliable correspondence
Your correspondence email in journals continues to function, ensuring potentially important contact and opportunities can make their way to you no matter how far into the future it may be.

✓  Career transitions
Your email doesn’t break when you change institution, sector, or retire.

✓  Collaboration & networking
Colleagues can reach you without guessing your current affiliation. No need to keep track of which email address you've given out to whom.

✓  Trust and recognisability among academics
All ScholarMail addresses are manually verified and cross-checked against ORCID profiles upon registration, making them trusted identifiers of research-active academics — providing the reassuring reputation signal of a university email address without the lock-in.

✓  Peace of mind & consistency
Confidently share your ScholarMail address on your ORCID profile, publications and other academic work, your personal website, lab pages, social profiles, and CVs, knowing correspondence will always reach you.

✓  No dependence on commercial email providers
Some academics avoid the problem of losing their institutional email by instead using a personal, for example Gmail, address for correspondence. Aside from the professionalism this can lack, one must be cautious in assuming long term 'ownership' of such an address. In reality, you are reliant on a for-profit company continuing to offer (usually free) consumer email accounts as part of their business operations — if this ceases to be part of their commercial roadmap at any point, your email address will be lost. In contrast, ScholarMail is maintained on a free forever basis by the academic community, for the academic community, with no profit-making motives.

FAQ

Can I send email from my ScholarMail address?

Our objective is to provide a permanent academic correspondence address that allows you to reliably receive professional mail for life, irrespective of any changes to your institutional affiliations. In line with this mission, we do not provide mailbox or SMTP functionality. However, many email services, such as Gmail, allow you to add “send as” or “send from” addresses. Note that your underlying, e.g. Gmail, address will likely still be visible to the recipient (they might see something like, 'From yourname@gmail.com on behalf of first.last@scholarmail.org'). In general, we would advise simply replying to emails received through your ScholarMail address using your regular email address. You can always include your ScholarMail address in your email footer so that contacts always know how to reach you should the institutional address you're sending from eventually stop working.

Can I use my ScholarMail address when submitting to journals?

Absolutely. Journals generally accept any email that successfully receives correspondence, and it is already fairly common for authors to give non-university correspondence addresses when submitting. ScholarMail addresses behave as normal email addresses and can receive peer review communications, proofs, update queries, etc., while additionally benefitting from cross-institutional longevity. Your institutional affiliation will be stated separately regardless, so there is no need for your email address domain to 'prove' this.

What happens when I change institution?

You simply update your institutional email address on your profile — nothing about your published ScholarMail address changes.

Why not just use my personal Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail etc. account for correspondence?

You absolutely could, and many do. While this solves the issue of your email address being tied to your current institution, it can lack perceived professionalism compared to a university or firstname.lastname@scholarmail.org address. Since all ScholarMail addresses are manually verified and cross-checked against ORCID profiles upon registration, they serve as trusted identifiers of research-active academics, providing the reassuring reputation signal of a university email address without the lock-in. With a commercial email account, you are also reliant on a for-profit entity continuing to offer (usually free) consumer email accounts as part of their business operations — if this ceases to be part of their commercial roadmap at any point in time, your email address will be lost. If you are comfortable with registering a domain, managing DNS records and finding an email hosting provider (or hosting your own mailserver if you are up for a challenge!), using a custom domain of your own for email correspondence provides fantastic long-term control, but this may be daunting or simply inconvenient for most, and also comes with ongoing domain renewal and email hosting costs. ScholarMail is designed to be the closest you can get to truly and indefinitely owning your email address without owning and having to manage the underlying domain and infrastructure — and is, and always will be, free.

How long will my ScholarMail address remain active?

Once allocated, your ScholarMail account is yours for life. Upon retirement, if you are using your institutional email as your forward-to address, you can simply update this to your personal email instead so that you continue to receive correspondence through your ScholarMail address.

Can ScholarMail read my emails?

No. We believe privacy is a fundamental human right, and have no access to the senders or content of emails received to your ScholarMail address. We partner with MXroute, a well-established independent email hosting provider, to provide our email infrastructure. Emails sent to your ScholarMail address are routed by MXroute to your chosen receiving address; since we do not provide mailboxes, IMAP storage or webmail, emails are not retained after forwarding. All emails passing through MXroute undergo industry standard spam filtering prior to forwarding for the safety of our members and to protect the integrity and IP-reputation of the service for all users (see How does ScholarMail work behind the scenes? below for more information). It should be mentioned, however, that email is not a particularly secure communication medium in general. While transport is typically protected with TLS between servers, message content is not end-to-end encrypted by default and may be readable by mail providers. Those with a particularly high risk profile may benefit from using PGP (which is compatible with ScholarMail; you would need to manage your keys in your downstream mailbox/client) or other forms of end-to-end encryption.

Who is behind The ScholarMail Project?

ScholarMail is operated by a team of individuals from the academic community — we are currently based at Imperial College London's Faculty of Natural Sciences. (Feel free to say hi! support@scholarmail.org)

How does ScholarMail work behind the scenes? What is the technical stack?

ScholarMail is built as a lightweight, privacy-respecting forwarding service designed for stability and long-term operation. We do not operate our own mail servers. Instead, the service is composed of well-established, resilient infrastructure components:

• Mail Transport & Forwarding: ScholarMail uses MXroute, an established email hosting provider with particular experience in delivery and reputation management, to manage our backend relay systems. To protect users and maintain strong delivery reputation with receiving providers (which is centrally important for our core service role of reliably forwarding genuine correspondence to our members), ScholarMail relies on spam filtering applied by our upstream provider, MXroute, who operate an advanced automated system that blocks spam and malicious mail, as well as emails sent from suspicious IPs (such as known botnets, compromised networks, and residential IPs) before they are forwarded to destination addresses. This filtering is based on industry-standard techniques (such as Apache SpamAssassin and internal reputation lists) that evaluate message characteristics such as sender IP and domain reputation, authentication failures, known spam patterns, and other heuristics.  The goal is to reduce unsolicited bulk and malicious email while allowing legitimate correspondence to reach our users, and ensuring ongoing high deliverability with the major email providers (Gmail, Outlook, etc.). To support modern email authentication standards during forwarding, ScholarMail uses Sender Rewriting Scheme (SRS); this rewrites the envelope sender address in a way that preserves forwarding compatibility with SPF while still allowing bounces to reach the correct place. Without SRS, forwarded mail would frequently fail authentication checks at Gmail, Outlook, and other major providers, leading to non-delivery.

• Verification & Account Logic: Account onboarding, profile updates, and forwarding changes are handled through a custom workflow built using a combination of Google Workspace services, Google Apps Script, and MXroute's API. This enables automated and secure account management on a budget that is sustainable for a not-for-profit project with a planned indefinite lifespan such as ours. Do note, however, that our reliance on Google infrastructure means that account management operations may not work in China (without the use of a VPN) due to its blocking of Google services through the Great Firewall; email delivery is unaffected, and you can always contact us for assistance.

• Forms & Data Storage: Application and account management forms are provided through Tally, with structured data stored in a private Google Workspace backend.

• Web Layer: Public-facing informational pages — such as this one — are hosted using Google Sites, which keeps overheads minimal and reduces the surface area for security vulnerabilities (*cough* WordPress *cough*).

'Forever' is not a word we take lightly, which is why sustainable operation is at the heart of our infrastructure design. Our goal is a simple yet durable system that can operate for years to come with minimal moving parts. This architecture allows ScholarMail to remain extremely reliable — realistically much more so than if we attempted to manage and host everything in-house — while keeping operational overheads to a minimum. Our modular setup also enables us to migrate rapidly and painlessly to other service providers should this be necessary in the future, to ensure our service outlives any single vendor or infrastructure dependency.

If you have any questions, our team are always accessible at support@scholarmail.org