One tool that might be useful is the VM MAILER's capacity to forward mail meant for one user to another. In the case where a real user gets a new userid to replace an old one, the user could ask techstaff to put such a forwarding request in MAILER MTPLATE. Of course, if you have a lot of users who want this, MAILER MTPLATE gets very full. (For how long? Give a user a month to get his id's straightened out?) And, alas, this doesn't help sites not running the Crosswell MAILER. (I do not know if the UCLA MAILER has this capacity.) Someone (Harry?) referred to id's being re-issued. I know some sites or nodes assign id's which reflect course enrollment. We don't take that approach; for general users, the id is a set of three initials and the last four digits of student id number (social security number, usually). While we haven't run any large analysis of this, we don't expect problems with two students "expecting" the same id. Lastly, a related problem: what about users whose passwords may have lapsed? Many VM sites (and perhaps other sites, too) lock an account if a password remains unchanged for N days. It used to be in VM that this would cause mail to be rejected; that may still be the case at many sites. If I get rejected mail from a site, do I know if a user is gone or merely temporarily off the system? Nick