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Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

>It was academia.edu, and who can possibly explain how they were able to get a domain name in the .edu TLD?

Relevant section From Wikipedia:

>Academia.edu is not a university or institution for higher learning and so under current standards it would not qualify for the ".edu" top-level domain. However, since the domain name "Academia.edu" was registered in 1999, before the regulations required .edu domain names to be held solely by accredited post-secondary institutions in the US, it is allowed to remain active and operational. All .edu domain names registered before 2001 were grandfathered in, even if not an accredited USA post-secondary institution.

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There are some 10minutemail / trashmail providers out there who provide .edu emails - great to get benefits which are only for students free, but sucks for everbody who is implementing these platforms to get those benefits because they can't just check if the domain ends on .edu but rather need to validate against a common list of valid universities...

> rather need to validate against a common list of valid universities

Don't you need that already anyway? There's no standard for how universities format their academic email addresses.

Plus, .edu only applies to American universities. Services validating if you're a "real" student by checking for .edu emails were quite annoying during my time as a student. A lot of these platforms don't seem to even know .edu is an American thing.

Given the list of non-university .edu domains is static (or even decreasing assuming some expire), couldn't you keep a list of those instead?

> validate against a common list of valid universities

Considering that many universities provide email addresses to alumni, I don't think that heuristic would work either.

Do they? The institutions I've worked with shut off e-mail access between 6 months and 1 year after a student is no longer active.

I wonder what the benefit is.

The benefit is that it makes it easier to hit them up for donations.

I'm not sure how common it is, but my wife has an edu email address despite being well over twenty years from graduation.

I still get the occasional email to mine inviting me to student events. Not sure they realize I graduated, but it was long enough ago that some of the buildings the events are held in didn't exist when I attended.

I distinctly remember that Freshman year, we were told in some big auditorium, during onboarding, that we should start using our university-provided emails as our primary "professional" emails.

Someone then asked what happens when we graduate and lose access to those emails, and they didn't have a particularly good answer.

I think that was also the same onboarding where they passed around a piece of paper for us to sign in with our name and social security number.

Despite originally saying it was a perk of graduation, mine ended cutting access after 10 years by citing cost saving (I imagine Google Workspace bills add up quickly, compared to self-hosting email). I wouldn't be surprised if this is the trend now.

A spammers dream.

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