Change has been a major source of headaches for students who have tried to access their new LiveMail account since the June 24 cut-off of student access to the utep.edu domain.

UTEP’s Information Technology department (IT) said that activation woes have accounted for 90 percent of the phone calls that the Help Desk has received since the domain change.

One recurring problem the Help Desk encounters is that students often lose their new e-mail’s activation code when they close the window displaying it. Luis Hernandez, assistant director of Information Technology, said those students could have avoided problems by reading more closely.

“We tried to simplify it as much as possible,” Hernandez said. “Another problem that we’ve seen is that students begin the process but do not complete it and their passwords get reset at some point. Since they don’t know the password they can’t get into their accounts and we don’t have a password for them.”

IT said they did expect activation dilemmas, but one problem that was not anticipated was the difficulty in synchronizing students’ passwords from the previous domain to the new one. IT hoped that students would not have to change their password to access their LiveMail account. Currently, IT is developing a list of students’ names whose passwords cannot be synchronized. This list will be sent to Microsoft, who will reset the password for those students so that IT may be able to complete the synchronization.

Freshman education major Esequiel Reyes didn’t activate his account at all and said he would only do so if his professors requested it.