Vermont state workers have a new suffix on their email address, a year after the state’s vermont.gov portal was created.
The change is already in effect, but state workers can still receive emails from their old state.vt.us and new vermont.gov addresses, said Richard Boes, chief information officer for the state.
For example, Boes’ old address of richard.boes@state.vt.us will now be richard.boes@vermont.gov.
The change to the vermont.gov portal was suggested by the federal government, Boes said. The government is planning to open the .us suffix to nongovernmental entities, so it is suggesting that states switch to .gov addresses because it’s meant solely for government entities, he said. More than 50 percent of states have done so, Boes said.
The change was also to avoid confusion by having the state government address, which was changed to vermont.gov a year ago, and the state workers’ email addresses use the same domain name, Boes said.
“We had some actual complaints from people that were going to vermont.gov portal and saw the url in the portal and didn’t know it was different from the state email addresses,” Boes said.
“Over time we expect people to change their address books, but it can be a year away,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Boes said it is a minor change that most people won’t notice.
“Nobody really has to do anything,” he said. “The change took all of 30 seconds to make.”
