Berkeley is finally getting rid of the ancient UClink e-mail system in January-- and replacing it with a far superior one. The biggest change will be the long-awaited switchover to simple ked@berkeley.edu addresses, as opposed to ked@uclink.berkeley.edu. Other big changes include reliability, an improved webmail interface, and getting rid of Berkeley's amazingly complicated system of separate networks. Plus a larger mailbox quota and better mailing list management.

Goodbye to Uclink.

UCLink's demise has been in the cards for years. The venerable system debuted more than a decade ago – an eternity in the fast-moving world of digital communications. Its 45,000 current accounts send more than 400,000 e-mail messages on a typical day, severely testing UCLink's aging infrastructure. The program's software is no longer supported by its vendor, and "the current hardware is already past the end of its usable life," said Brion Moss, technical lead for BERT and an analyst with Central Computing Services. "We're nursing it and babying it and burping it to try to keep it going."

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