Once fas.alumni closes, Armstrong will forward his post.harvard mail to a Yahoo! account instead. But he said he will no longer be able to check his personal mail from work, because JP Morgan blocks access to sites like Yahoo!.

Armstrong said that the fas.alumni account was not advertised to him as part of a pilot test.

“I signed on one day, and [the web site] said we offer e-mail accounts on our server,” Armstrong said.

And on one Class of 2003 graduate’s HAA web page obtained by The Crimson, Harvard was still advertising a “new 2003 email account,” and a sign-up page appeared still to be functioning. The page did not suggest that the fas.alumni accounts were offered on a trial basis.

With the close of the fas.alumni accounts, Harvard’s policy of only providing forwarding addresses to its graduates will be akin to those of its peer institutions, including Brown, Columbia, Duke, MIT, and Yale.

At Stanford, graduates can register for a free 10-megabyte full account. But if they want a larger storage limit, Stanford charges them $30 a year for a 250-megabyte account.

The university currently most similar to Harvard is Princeton, which, in addition to forwarding, administers a small number of full alumni accounts—mostly leftovers from a decade ago, when free e-mail options were scarce.

Kathy Taylor, the director of special projects at Princeton’s alumni council, called those full accounts “very rudimentary,” and said Princeton had suspended new registration for the hosted accounts earlier this year as it reviewed whether to continue offering them.

—Staff writer Brendan R. Linn can be reached at blinn@fas.harvard.edu.