Most students have had this experience: you type your friend or classmate's name into Lotus Notes, and you are confronted with a pop-up box: 'This name is not unique.' If you don't know the person's middle initial or their year in school, you may end up sending an e-mail to the wrong person or have to send it to everyone with that name.

For students with common names, missing e-mails (and consequently missing meetings or information) has become routine.

'I have missed so many e-mails from professors, from my fraternity, the scholarship dinner,' said Jennifer Jones, senior music education major. 'You name it, I've probably missed it because they send it to the wrong person.'

Emily Miller, a sophomore psychology major, has the opposite problem.

'Sometimes I get way too many e-mails,' she said. 'I'll get e-mails for clubs that I'm not in. This one time, I kept getting e-mails from KU Catering about a work schedule, and I'm like, 'This isn't me!''

Miller said that when this happens, she usually contacts the person who sent the e-mail to let them know that they need to e-mail a different Emily Miller.

She suggested that students always be required to write down their middle initial, year in school and ID number when writing their name on forms at UD.

Freshman operations management major Colleen Smith said she tries to avoid the e-mail problem by always giving people her full e-mail address. Even so, she said she often receives e-mails asking, 'Is this the Colleen Smith that's a freshman on the crew team'?

Another Colleen Smith, a graduate of the university, said in an e-mail that she was a member of the Lighthouse Retreat team her first year at UD. When others on the team would mention something that seemed out of the blue, she would assume that they were just being funny. She eventually learned that she had been missing most of the e-mails sent out about the retreat.

'I found myself at a couple meetings unprepared, and didn't contribute to bringing outside supplies when they were needed,' Smith said. 'The e-mails were sent to another Colleen M. Smith.'

Susan McCabe, director of systems integration for UDit, said that this is the reason each student's e-mail address, formed from the Novell usernames, is different.

'We create unique usernames to avoid such conflicts,' McCabe said in an e-mail. 'The standard naming convention of usernames is the first six characters [of the last name], [followed] by first initial then middle initial. In the case of duplicates, the last letter is assigned a 'z.' If there is yet another, they would be a 'y.''

Julie Smith, who is currently studying in Berlin, suggested in an e-mail that UD not 'recycle' e-mail addresses for common names like Smith. The person who had her 'smithjua' username previously had subscribed to 'disturbing' newsletters and e-mail lists from which Smith has not been able to unsubscribe. Additionally, she said the recycling of e-mail addresses is violation of the previous person's privacy.

'I've received notes from his bank, Ebay and Amazon accounts,' she said. 'I can't even forward them to him or let him know that I'm receiving them.'

It is not just with e-mail that problems can occur. Ashley Miller, a freshman pre-physical therapy major, experienced several mix-ups as soon as she arrived at school. She went to fill out forms for a job, and realized that the forms she was filling out had another Ashley Miller's information.

She had a similar problem when she went to pick up her computer. She was again mistaken for a different Ashley Miller and ended up in the wrong line.

'I actually got the wrong computer, but it wasn't Ashley Miller's computer,' Miller said. 'It was Adam Miller's computer. It was really weird.'

Julie Smith has had more problems outside of UD than at the university. When she went to vote in the last election, there was a stamp by her name saying she had committed a first-degree felony. She had to prove her identity before she was allowed to vote.

Kathy Harmon, associate director of student scholarships, suggested that students memorize their student ID numbers and pay attention to grades and billing statements to ensure that they do not receive another person's documents. Then, if something seems wrong, they can contact the appropriate office to check.

'Be responsible for your own information,' she said.

Harmon said that the scholarship office uses student ID numbers to keep track of students with scholarships, so similar names are usually not a problem. She remembered only one incident in which there was confusion.

'Someone saw two names that were the same and just entered the wrong ID,' she explained.

Often an alumnus will call recommending a particular student be admitted to UD or receive a scholarship, and common names can cause some confusion in this case, Harmon said. She recommends that if the student does not already have an ID number, the caller provide the name of the student's hometown or high school.

Most of the students with common names said that they like their names despite the confusion they sometimes cause.

'It's like the most generic name ever, that anyone can spell,' Emily Miller laughed. 'I never have to worry about a teacher pronouncing it wrong ' It's always easy to say.'