Is it right to blame Google/Yahoo for deprecating an email forwarding service?

My former university, Simon Fraser University, had a service for graduates where you could keep your old xxxxx@sfu.ca email address after graduation they would forward messages to an external email address.

I've been using this email address for 20 years now but they suddenly announced that they have to deprecate this service "to comply with industry-wide regulations" led by Google and Yahoo.

A FAQ was just posted (https://www.sfu.ca/information-systems/announcements-alerts/major-initiatives/Changes-to-SFU-email-forwarding-protocol.html) but it has very little information as to why this was necessary.

Is there a legitimate technical reason why the Google/Yahoo changes would make it impossible or difficult to continue offering mail forwarding?

Sorry, but this isn't brand new stuff.

As a small business owner, you should have had DMARC, SPF, and DKIM set up already to ensure your mail gets delivered properly.

DMARC happened 9 years ago, so I don't see why that would be related. I attended two universities in the United States, and they are both still happily forwarding emails to me. They have both been using Google Workspace for the last decade or so. So, for what it's worth, it seems like it's just your school that is doing this. Perhaps their IT department just has particularly dumb leadership that is trying to cover their ass for something they don't understand. Or maybe they have budget cuts?

Gmail now requires mail forwarders to cryptographically attest to the original DMARC alignment of forwarded mail: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en

Your former university may be using mail software that doesn't support ARC (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8617) or they've decided setting it up isn't worth it.

The University of Minnesota Twin Cities offered Gmail to students when I attended '11-'15. They allowed alumni to keep the account and I respectfully used it, though infrequently, and kept my account active with reminders to log into it every 90 days. Late last year they claimed that Google was beginning to charge much more for accounts, and those alumni accounts were going to close.

This isn't the same as the forwarding service, but maybe the overhead wasn't worth it anymore.