With the deadline for students to switch their email accounts over to the new NT mail system only a week away, a recent email sent out by the IT department has brought the total number of students using the NT-based email system to 842, according to Director of Information Technology (IT) Philip Fitz. The IT department hopes to have 1,152 students on the NT system by next week.

Fitz said that students were asked to complete the switch by April 2 and that he had been concerned until recently because very few students had made the switch.

"The process has been going very, very well in the last week," added Desktop Computing Associate Nicholas Dahlman '98.

Dahlman said that several students have voiced their desire to continue using VAX. However, only seniors and students who are studying abroad have the option of continuing to use VAX for the remainder of the school year.

Fitz said that, while he is unsure what exactly will be done about student accounts that are not switched by the April deadline, it is likely that the College will switch all VAX accounts to the new system before VAX is removed in September.

However, this would pose a problem because students' passwords would be changed. Fitz added that, because the College cannot give passwords over the phone for confidentiality reasons, students would be unable to access their Amherst accounts during the summer if they did not switch.

"Our goal is to have the switch completed when we go home so that [students] can read their email over the summer," he said.

Fitz said that the College is trying to create a new structure to identify users and deal with club accounts, because VAX had over 1,000 club accounts and many of them were not being used. He said that the College plans to allow clubs to have accounts but that they must have contact persons and renew the accounts each semester.