Back on campus after a semester on leave, a junior went to check her mail. She entered the familiar combination and found, to her surprise, a bag of chocolates. Assuming it was a welcome gift for all students, she enjoyed the treat. But two weeks later, she received a package arrival notice listing an unfamiliar campus box number — and she began to have suspicions about the chocolates.
It was only after asking University Mail Services about the unfamiliar number that she found out her campus mailbox had been changed.
The junior — who asked that her name be withheld because it is illegal to open another person's mail — realized her old mailbox had been reassigned to another student, but the combination had not been changed. She said if she had not received the package arrival notice, she might still be accessing another student's mailbox.
Four students — including the female junior — have reported to The Herald that their mailboxes were reassigned without notification this semester after they returned from studying abroad or leaves of absence.
But the lock combinations were not changed, and all four students continued to receive mail at their old boxes, unaware the boxes had been reassigned until receiving mail that was not addressed to them — or in the case of the female junior, receiving the package arrival notice with a new mailbox listed on it. After bringing the mail to the student service window in J. Walter Wilson, students were told their mailboxes had been assigned to new owners.
"I was never officially notified," wrote Amitte Rosenfeld '12.5, who returned this semester from a leave of absence, in an e-mail to The Herald.
There is no inventory of extra mailboxes, so boxes must be put to use if their owners are not currently on campus, said Fred Yattaw, manager of Mail Services. "The mailboxes must find an owner," he said. Mail Services has no time to notify individual students who return to campus from being away that their mailboxes have changed, he said.
Students also raised concerns about the security and privacy implications of reassigning mailboxes without changing the combinations.
Yattaw said making such modifications would be time-consuming and that there has never been a problem with unchanged combinations in his 43 years with Mail Services.
