Better E-Mail

Most of us are well acquainted with annoying e-mails from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) e-mail servers complaining our inboxes are over quota. Although our official storage space is around 200 megabytes, our e-mail folders cannot exceed 50 percent of that. And even worse, our inbox is limited to 40 megabytes. In these times of free unlimited storage, when companies like Google boast "never delete e-mail again" slogans, our FAS services are unacceptably limited.

But restricted storage is not our only concern; our e-mail servers are also unreliable. Last week, the FAS UNIX and e-mail servers failed for several hours. Apart from the obvious inconvenience for everyone, several students had problems submitting papers and problem sets due at noon that day.

Those two issues perfectly summarize our relationship with FAS e-mail support. The e-mail system is outdated, slow, and far too limited for current standards. For those reasons, we need something different, and we are glad that FAS Computing services is warming up to that fact. We encourage FAS to begin exploring the possibility of outsourcing our webmail.

In particular, over the past few months, both Google and Microsoft have started education sector initiatives aimed at signing universities to their new hosting services, customizing the look and feel of the service to fit each university’s needs and wishes. Microsoft’s "Windows Live @ Edu" has signed on almost 60 universities worldwide, and Google’s Gmail service is a success with consumers all over the world. In the next few weeks, fellow Ivy League school University of Pennsylvania will be choosing a vendor after a semester of consideration. We hope Harvard will follow suit soon after.

Students want a better interface and gigabytes of space rather than megabytes. As long as the relevant privacy concerns about hosting e-mails on outside servers are addressed, a shift to an outside service would be a welcome change making over-quota e-mails a thing of the past.