A pool of Cornell University early-decision applicants received erroneous e-mails welcoming them to the university last week.

Approximately 1,700 high school students who submitted early-admission applications received the e-mail even though more than 550 of them had been rejected from the university in December.

The students opened their e-mails, which began, “Greetings from Cornell, your future alma mater! Congratulations on your acceptance into the class of 2007!”

Only 1,128 of the 1,700 students were supposed to receive the congratulatory e-mail message.

Cornell officials said the message was not designed as a letter of acceptance; early-decision applicants had already been notified of their acceptance. The main intent of the message was to get admitted students excited about attending Cornell in the fall.

The e-mail also included important information regarding housing arrangement dates for the upcoming semester, what students on Cornell’s campus were currently doing and even how its sports teams were performing.

What was supposed to be a joyful and exciting e-mail left more than 570 students confused. Those students received an additional e-mail hours later, retracting the acceptance they received earlier that day.

An apparent “computer coding error” left university officials scrambling to correct the mistake and apologize to the hundreds of misinformed students. Officials noticed more e-mails where sent out than were intended, which led them to the problem. The second e-mail was sent within two to three hours of the first.

“The Undergraduate Admissions Office recently sent you a congratulatory e-mail by mistake,” read the e-mail sent out by Angela Griffin-Jones, Cornell’s Dean of Undergraduate Admissions. “My sincere apologies to you and your family for any confusion and distress this message has caused.”

Mistakes of this sort have been made in the past ? usually with paper letters. Once such a letter or e-mail is sent, it is nearly impossible to retrieve it.

“The office immediately began reviewing the causes for the situation and will implement means to insure that errors of this kind will not occur in the future,” Griffin-Jones said in her statement regarding the matter. “We have asked the Cornell Audit Office and the Office of Information Technologies to lend us their expertise and involvement in [order to create] guidelines and procedures that will prevent further problems.”

Although the mistake may have left hundreds of high school students extremely disappointed, Cornell officials said that the only thing they could do was apologize. Within the past week, Cornell has received a number of phone calls complaining about the mistake.

“It was never the intention of the Admissions Office to cause harm, even though we understand that some students and their families may have experienced distress,” Griffin-Jones said. “Again, my personal apologies go out to students and families who have been affected by this unfortunate situation.”