E-mail address to use in publications It is customary to use one's academic e-mail address as contact address in publications; I have seen once or twice an @gmail.com address being used instead, but it simply looked unprofessional.

However, I already experienced personally twice that system administrators love to deactivate e-mail addresses when people leave the institution. In a time when serving 1 GB of data costs one cent, apparently it is too demanding to set up forwarding for a few old users.

This leads to "e-mail rot" in many published papers, also for addresses that are explicitly designated as contact addresses. If one happens to have a popular name, it might become difficult to identify them using a search engine after the e-mail address becomes invalid.

What is your proposed solution to this problem? Should we (well, the ones of us that have tenure and power) put pressure on system administrator to change this practice? Should we use in our publications a different, more stable e-mail address than the academic one? Should we maybe get rid of the e-mail and contact address in papers overall? Should we insist that the journal publishers set up an alternative contact system (good luck with that)?

Related question: Changing mailing and e-mail addresses as corresponding author--which to include?
Personally, I think that (in academia) sticking to official e-mail addresses is an atavism.

Currently, one's personal e-mail (say, ...@gmail.com) is better because:


usually more efficient/stable/etc,
lasts for longer than 1-4 years.


While names like mad_theoretican_666@... may sound ridiculous for professional communications (but it's rather a matter of taste than anything else), I don't see anything wrong with e-mails like name.surname@ or n.surname@.

However, I heard quite a few times that non-institutional e-mails sounds less serious. 

But honestly, if someone builds his/her value depending on how his/her e-mail sounds (and doing it against very practical reasons), it is the thing that is ridiculous.