I've just lived through that, sort of. I was done with grad school last semester, and the department admins immediately shut down all my department accounts. S

I've just lived through that, sort of. I was done with grad school last semester, and the department admins immediately shut down all my department accounts. Seven years of academic communication disappeared overnight. Luckily, after some emailing (CC: head of dept.), they provided me with the MBOX files, which I can load with Thunderbird and a plugin. Otherwise, my email client would have been my only offline copy.