Just weeks after the Chancellor's Task Force on Community and Civility submitted its report, the Computer Center is set to implement one of its recommendations, a new option for e-mail addresses.

Beginning March 29, each individual in the University community will be given an alias e-mail address, consisting of their first name, last name, and the uconn.edu domain: firstname.lastname@uconn.edu The alias addresses will be in addition to existing e-mail addresses but they will work together.

"This is something the University community has been asking for for a while," says Malcolm Toedt, executive director of the University Computing Center.

One of the reasons for the change, says Toedt, is to give people an e-mail address that is more representative of them as individuals. Many, especially those whose work requires them to log on to the University's administrative system, have impersonal e-mail addresses, such as vpfadm99.

The new e-mail address will serve as a personal mnemonic that will enable other people, especially those who are outside the University, to make an educated guess as to how to reach someone at UConn by e-mail.

The old e-mail addresses won't go away, however. E-mail sent to the new address will go to an electronic postmaster, which will check it against the lists of staff and students in the University's administrative system and automatically forward the message to the recipient's existing e-mail account. E-mail will move through the UConn network as though the message were sent directly to the original e-mail account.

Where two individuals have the same name, the alias e-mail address will also use the middle initial. In the small number of cases where the initial is also the same, it will use a sequence number.

"There may be a few problems," says Toedt, "such as in cases where an individual has multiple e-mail accounts or is commonly known not by the full given name, such as Malcolm, but by a shortened form or other nickname, like Mac.

"We will work with individuals to remedy the glitches as they are discovered," he says. "We will also be enhancing this system toward the end of the year to permit individuals to set their own alias names."

A direct mailing to students and staff, and a forthcoming site on the computer center website, www.ucc.uconn.edu, will give further details of the new system.

Elizabeth Omara-Otunnu