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Important Information About Your Bobcat Email

Recent graduates have access to their Bobcat email address for one year after graduation. The following information is provided by the GCSU IT department to help you close out your student experience in the most informed way possible. 

Prepare for account deactivation:
In 12 months from the time you graduate, your bobcats.gcsu.edu email account will inactivate and your account will be deleted. You will receive email notification from IT prior to this happening.  When you lose access to your email account, you will also lose access to any documents that are stored in your associated:

• OneDrive
• OneNote
• MS Teams
• Office 365 software/apps provided by Georgia College

Please go ahead and begin transferring things to a new email account, and begin storing documents/files that may be contained in the above mentioned places, as your access will go away.

Why This Is Happening
GCSU accounts are a state of Georgia paid-for resource. Part of trying to keep education as affordable as possible is to keep costs down. Published (and publishable) is after 12 months of leaving the campus, their accounts will be subject to being purged. Shortly after leaving GCSU, students should work to move anything they want to keep out of GCSU systems and into their personal accounts.

Important Steps to Take Now
Tip 1 – Get a personal email account
If you do not already have a personal email account, you should create one immediately. We do NOT recommend that you use an Internet Service Provider (ISP) email like windstream.com, spectrum.com, att.com, etc. If you ever move off that ISP, you will lose your account.

Recommendation: Stick with generic accounts like Google (gmail.com) or Microsoft (outlook.com). If you are not already using the personal account as your preferred email, begin using it now!

Tip 2 – Begin migrating your content to your personal account
If you still have information you want to keep in your email or any of the Office products, you should start exporting that content so that you can import it into your personal account. There are many websites that provide information on migrating content from one provider to another.

Important deadline: After the 12-month post-graduation time period, you will not have access to any of your bobcats information, so give yourself plenty of time to get everything moved out.

Tip 3 – Review all of your logins and change anything using your bobcats email address
Migrating your content is only part of the process. You may have used your bobcats email address as the primary login or username for other personal accounts, websites, apps, social media platforms, YouTube, gaming platforms, etc.

For all of these services, you need to change these to your personal email account. Remember that you will not be able to use the bobcats email address for:

• Account access
• Password resets
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) requests
• Any other account verification

Be thorough in looking at all your accounts so that you do not miss something important.

Tip 4 – If you are still using the GC-issued Office 365, you will need to get your own Microsoft 365 license
Personal Microsoft 365 accounts are available to purchase through Microsoft for only $99.99/year. If you have a family, you can purchase the Microsoft 365 Family bundle for $129.99/year, which you can share with up to five other people.

Visit: Microsoft 365 Products

Need Help?
If you have any questions or need assistance beyond the resources you can find on the Internet, please feel free to reach out to our GCSU Ask IT department.