Sonoma State University is phasing in e-mail as the official way it will communicate with students, a more efficient and effective way than sending out thousands of cards and letters.

"Our students are very familiar with technology and we think it will be a convenience for them," said Katharyn Crabbe, vice provost for academic affairs. "With the U.S. mail, we encounter some barriers. Students have to keep us informed of their address changes, and they often don't."

E-mail also will save the university money. Crabbe said he hasn't totaled postage costs, but mailing tuition bills alone is an estimated $25,000 a year.

The switch to e-mail is also a logical progression for Sonoma State, which in 1995 became the first public university to require that its students have their own PCs and ever since has always stayed on the front edge of technology.

"This is part of an ongoing initiative to ensure our students graduate from college with fairly sophisticated knowledge of how to use information technology as a tool," Crabbe said. "Part of that program is to move our students into mastering this set of tools we think will be important to them. This is a step down that road."

Students already use the Internet to register for classes, check grades and transcripts, communicate with instructors and, depending on the professor, for some classroom work.

Crabbe said the switch to all e-mail messages has already started and by next fall virtually all communications with students will be online, eliminating such mailings as cards announcing registration deadlines and notices of financial aid awards.

The program is not unique to Sonoma State. A number of California State University campuses already use e-mail for communications, as do the universities of Arizona and Minnesota and Northwestern University, SSU officials said.

To handle the change, Sonoma State spent $40,000 on additional e-mail servers to handle 10,000 e-mail accounts, one for each student and staff member. Before, the campus had about 2,000 e-mail accounts for students and staff.

Students now will be responsible for checking their SSU e-mail accounts, which can be done from any computer on the Internet, using their student identification and password for authentication.

With the new system, university staff will easily be able to send out notices campuswide, to all students, to students by individual schools, departments and disciplines, or to even smaller groups of students in a single class.

"People try to do that now, but it requires someone to manually maintain the e-mail list, which is just about impossible," said Sam Scalise, chief information officer. "We could even create an e-mail list of a single class. Maybe the instructor is sick or can't be in class. He can e-mail the class and say he won't be there tomorrow.

"We can create e-mail lists automatically that are updated every day, with no intervention from anyone," Scalise said.