Student Email Address Format to Change

Beginning in May 2008, we will change the format for student usernames and email addresses.  There are three primary reasons for this change.

1. The number of conflicts for student usernames is unacceptably high – over 10% of students have a mal-formed username (something other than first 7 letters of their last name + first initial).  Many staff addresses are similarly mal-formed.  This greatly complicates email correspondence within the community, as some people regularly receive messages intended for another person, while others never receive messages intended for them.
   
2. Wabash provides a permanent alumni forwarding email address to all alumni upon graduation.  One key purpose of this is to facilitate communication with our alumni, particularly our younger alumni.  Under the current system, students receive a new Wabash email address upon graduation (in the format nickname.lastnameclass@wabash.edu, e.g. tom.jones08@wabash.edu).  Providing a new address defeats the main purpose of the program for new alumni, as they still have the fairly arduous task of switching to using a new address.  Students would greatly prefer to retain their student Wabash email address as their alumni forwarding address.
   
3. We are currently planning changes to our network-wide account directory system, as well as a change to the email platform, which makes this a good time to consider a change to the naming scheme.  Further, changes to a variety of campus systems in the last several years have eliminated the 8-character maximum for usernames, which makes available naming schemes not previously possible.

Student Username/Email Address Construction
After a review of naming schemes in use at similar institutions, we considered several potential construction schemes for students.  We tested each potential scheme against the last 80 class years of Wabash alumni (17,500 names) to assess likely duplication rates.  After careful evaluation and analysis, we will adopt following scheme:

• Student usernames and email addresses will be composed of the first initial, middle initial, first 6-digits of last name, and 2-digits of class year.  For example, Jonathan Henry Williamson '09 would have a username jhwillia09.  Looking at the last 80 years of Wabash students this format predicts a conflict rate of only 0.15%, while keeping the maximum length of a username at 10 characters.
  
• If a student has no middle name, the middle initial would simply be skipped.
  
• Current students would retain their current username/email address, but we would create email aliases using the new scheme for existing students, and publish the new email address in printed and online directories.
  
• The student username would not change if a student’s class year changes.  However, if a student graduates late and takes his new year as his reunion year, we will create a forwarding email address at that time with the new class year, on request of the student.
  
• Alumni who become employees would retain their alumni eServices forwarding address for personal use, and be assigned an employee username/email address for their Wabash professional use.  These alumni could forward their alumni address to their Wabash address if desired, using tools currently available.

For more information on this change, please contact the Help Desk (helpdesk@wabash.edu, 765-361-6400).