The present study investigated the types and distribution of request strategies employed by Iranian MA students of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) in authentic academic emails addressed to their professors using Blum-Kulka and Olshtain’s (1984) Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Pattern (CCSARP) framework across three email categories: (1) homework checking and assignment-related inquiries, (2) requests for thesis editing and feedback, and (3) requests for research topics, recommended readings, or other academic resources. The corpus consisted of 102 naturally occurring emails produced by a gender-balanced sample of 50 advanced-level learners enrolled at Shahre Qods and Tehran North branches of Islamic Azad University. Descriptive statistics revealed that explicit performatives and strong hints were jointly the most frequent strategies (both 16.7%), closely followed by hedged performatives (16.4%) and mood derivable (14.9%). Conventionally, indirect strategies, and non-conventional indirect strategies were markedly underrepresented (≤ 8.3%). Crosstabulation and chi-square results showed no statistically significant differences (p > 0.05), indicating that Iranian MA TEFL students adopt relatively uniform request patterns regardless of contextual variables such as topic sensitivity or perceived imposition. These findings suggest persistent L1 pragmatic transfer and insufficient metapragmatic awareness even at the postgraduate level, highlighting the need for explicit instruction in conventionally indirect request realization in digital academic discourse. Ultimately, the study underscores that successful intercultural academic communication requires Iranian EFL learners to develop not only linguistic accuracy but also sociopragmatic competence in interpreting and producing contextually appropriate requests when interacting with faculty members.