There are currently over 15000 userids which are able to receive e-mail at this university. There are over 2000 different machines that these people can use to read their mail. This is too much of a load for one machine to handle efficiently, thus some departments have elected to spool their own e-mail on their own servers. Since more than one machine receives e-mail, a mechanism must be in place to allow messages to reach these machines. E-mail addresses should remain constant.
People move around all the time, especially the students.
Sometimes they want their mail sent to them in the CS department, sometimes they want it in the EE department. These changes should be transparent to the other users. It is unreasonable to require that people consult a campus directory every time they want to send a message. E-mail addresses should never be ambiguous . This statement has substantial implications.