I was promised when I was in school that my email would be maintained forever. They shut it off last year, about 10 years after the promise. No skin off my nose, since I used a "real" one even then, but it inconvenienced some people I knew.

(In other news, I recommend owning your own domain quite highly. You can use it to farm services out to any number of providers with just some DNS entries, but it means you can switch any of them any time just as easily.)

> They didn't really have a good answer for whether that e-mail would stick around after I graduated. Or whether access to that account would be available forever, or whether it would be free.

Yeah, that can be an issue. It seems to be pretty common now for universities to let folks keep their email addresses (since they often outsource the addresses to google).

> I didn't even bother asking why anyone would want an ugly e-mail address like pxl014000@utdallas.edu to be their official formal means of communication.

Very true. Though, often one can set up an email alias (assuming you don't have a name that's too common!).