College email was deleted, lost all my contacts.

Everybody eventually and unfortunately learns this same lesson about keeping backups. Sometimes we learn by watching others lose their data, and more often we learn by us losing our own data.

If you were storing your contacts on the now-deleted college contacts server, and if that data had no backups by you, or no server backups by the college, then the data is gone. Contact the college IT department and ask about this, assuming this wasn’t a college bankruptcy or such.

If the contacts were stored in iCloud, the data should still be there.

You can’t attach a 3rd party email account to your Apple ID or iCloud. You can view 3rd party email accounts in the Mail app, view contacts associated with that account in Contacts, but that does not add them to your Apple account. Likewise for Notes, Calendars and Reminders; all are tied to an email account.

If you can no longer access that account I’m afraid you are out of luck.

The way mail (and contacts) work is in the iPhone User Guide - Apple Support, but who reads manuals anymore?

Lawrence Finch wrote:

You can’t attach a 3rd party email account to your Apple ID or iCloud.

A slight correction: a third-party email does work as an Apple Account, though it does not have an iCloud email address.

Such an account can have associated iCloud storage as well, including for contacts data.

This is why checking iCloud might find the missing Contacts data.

MrHoffman wrote:

Lawrence Finch wrote:

You can’t attach a 3rd party email account to your Apple ID or iCloud.

A slight correction: a third-party email does work as an Apple Account, though it does not have an iCloud email address.

Such an account can have associated iCloud storage as well, including for contacts data.

This is why checking iCloud might find the missing Contacts data.

True, but only if you save the contacts as you enter them to the Apple ID or iCloud, or have the Default Account set to your Apple ID or iCloud.