IRO is considering ending the @intelretiree email forwarder service. Originally IRO offered this forwarder to use when volunteering without giving out your personal email. But in reality, any email reply would come from your personal email so it wasn’t effective to hide your personal email anyway.
Later, when Intel bought out McAfee and began offering free licenses to Intel employees and retirees, their registration process required an email address from name@intel.com for employees or name@intelretiree.com for retirees. Now that the free subscriptions have ended, the McAfee discount like all other retiree discounts, uses Beneplace which requires your personal email for registration.
In the past 1-2 years, an increasing number of IRO members have been experiencing problems receiving email sent through the forwarder due to increased scrutiny by mail services (such as Google’s Gmail service.) As the mail services implement ever changing heuristic rules and AI to prevent phishing scams and spam email, they often route email that came through an outside forwarder to your spam folder, or delay delivery for hours or days, or just not deliver the email. These delays and deletions of emails make using an email forwarder address very unreliable.
The IRO mailbox monitors spend a lot of time reading and responding to emails about the forwarder not delivering. Some people have unsubscribed from IRO emails and are therefore no longer IRO members and their forwarder has been removed; we can help get you resubscribe in that case. But there is nothing we can do from our side for undelivered mail sent through the forwarder – what your email service does depends on opaque rules that they do not openly share. Often the problem is intermittent. So if the email forwarder is no longer useful to our members, we will eliminate it and the extra work and complexity to maintain the forwarder as retirees join, unsubscribe, rejoin, etc.
Note that the Intel Retiree Organization does not use the forwarder address for sending you email or for member administration. Mailings such as the News Flash or site events go directly to the personal email address that you used when you signed up to IRO.
We are interested to hear if there are other uses for the @intelretiree.com email forwarder service going forward. If you have a need for the @Intelretiree.com email address (it’s an email forwarder, not a direct email service) please let us know via the IRO mailbox. We will collect information for the next couple of months and then make a final decision.