Beginning April 13th, SMU students, staff and faculty will be noticing changes to their SMU e-mail accounts.

The ITS department said in its April newsletter that users should expect services such as Webmail, E-mail and PPP to be unavailable that Sunday while it completes changes that are being made to the system.

“There are different interfaces for users to get to their e-mail,” Allen Hughes, director of ITS services, said. “Everyone will be moved to the Webmail interface.”

Hughes said the old POST machine that some e-mail accounts are still currently stored on will be completely shut down once all the accounts are moved to the new system.

Current SMU e-mail addresses, namely the ones with mail.smu.edu suffixes, will remain the same. However, logins will be the users’ eight-digit SMU ID number, rather than their e-mail ID (e.g. jdoe will now be 1234-5678).

Hughes explained that the different internet services provided by SMU require different usernames and passwords to login. He said next week’s changes are part of ITS’s effort to unify all services for faculty, staff and students and to reduce the number of usernames and passwords.

Another change for the SMU accounts is that the system will no longer automatically forward e-mail from a mail.smu.edu account to another service provider. Users with AOL, Yahoo! and other outside e-mail accounts that have the automatic forward feature will no longer be able to receive e-mails forwarded from the SMU accounts. Users will have to login directly to their mail.smu.edu account in order to receive the e-mails sent to those addresses.

“It’s currently a technological limitation on the new server,” Hughes said about the automatic forward feature. He said users can still directly forward e-mails they receive by simply clicking on the forward button in the Webmail interface. But the automatic forward feature is still being worked on, along with improved SPAM filtering and spell-checking features.

WebCT and Access.SMU will not be affected by the April 13th changes. However, ITS is working on integrating all of SMU’s internet services to be accessible under one username and one password.