More than 70 percent of the 24,500 eligible undergraduate and graduate students have switched to the Google-hosted GWMail since the new e-mail system launched this August.

For students who have yet to activate a GWMail account, there’s still time, but not much, said Ronald Bonig, vice president and chief information officer. After March 1, 2009, students will no longer have access to their Colonial Mail accounts.

Mail sent to the gwu.edu address will continue to be forwarded after that date, but students must sign up for GWMail to view it. The new e-mail domain, which will eventually be the only usable e-mail address, is gwmail.gwu.edu.

“Eventually the forwarding will stop, but I promise to give students at least a one-year notice before that goes away,” Bonig said, adding that it would likely be at least two more years before e-mails sent to a gwu.edu address will no longer forward to a gwmail.gwu.edu account.

Though students are now using GWMail, Colonial Mail is still the primary mail system for faculty and staff. That will also change sometime after students have made the switch, Bonig said.

“It’s more difficult to make the switch for the faculty and staff because many of them have sizable professional accounts with more capabilities and it would take a little more coordination,” he said. “We may decide to go with a different system than GWMail for faculty, and there are a number of different options, but we haven’t considered that yet.”