E-mail? More like e-fail.
A recent e-mail account mix-up for students enrolled in courses at multiple Penn schools has left some undergraduates without important messages appearing in their inboxes.
According to College junior Mark Pan, the issue began during the spring semester of last year, when he enrolled in an Engineering course entitled CIS 110, Introduction to Computer Programming. He explained that a School of Engineering and Applied Science e-mail account was created for him and that his e-mails were then sent to both his SAS and SEAS e-mail addresses without his knowledge.
Pan said after the course ended, his e-mails were only sent to the SEAS account.
He said roughly one-third of his Blackboard-related e-mails were not received on his SAS account, his primary e-mail address. He also did not receive e-mails relating to Penn Directories or housing lists.
College junior Andrew Lohfeld, who also enrolled in computer and information science courses, had missed class listserv e-mails, among other messages as of the beginning of November.
“I missed about 12 package notices,” Lohfeld said. “If I hadn’t known I was going to be receiving them and not gotten notification from Amazon, they would have been sent back.”
Lohfeld recounted that as a staff member of the Harrison College House Office, he noticed that his name was listed with his SEAS account rather than his primary SAS e-mail address. He then saw that around 30 other students were listed with default e-mail addresses that did not match their addresses from last semester.
Lohfeld explained that this occurred not only with SEAS accounts, but also with the Wharton School and School of Medicine accounts.
In response to the account switch, Pan was able to change his default e-mail on both Blackboard and Penn Directories back to his SAS account.
Pan pointed out that e-mail addresses on some lists cannot be changed so readily. For example, he added, housing lists are compiled each summer, but are not updated over the course of the year.
Engineering’s Computing and Educational Technology Services has been able to identify the issue and will proceed to rectify the situation, according to Helen Anderson, the Engineering IT senior director.
“We have identified some other people whose SAS addresses were unintentionally replaced by their other Penn e-mail addresses in the Penn online directory,” Anderson wrote in an e-mail.
She added that that SAS Computing would contact the individuals affected by the mix-up.
According to Anderson, the IT department will take precautionary measures to ensure that such instances are not repeated.
“We will start by checking people with multiple school affiliations to verify that their mail is either being read or being forwarded in all of their accounts,” she wrote.
The IT department will also request that members of the Penn community update their online directory information, Anderson added.
