The start of the semester ushered in a 1GB e-mail quota. This five-fold increase from 200MB starts to address the frustration of students who are incessantly required to delete e-mails from their overflowing inboxes. Nonetheless, the quota remains far below Gmail’s 6 GB limit or Yahoo’s unlimited storage, and students will be able to fully reap the benefits of this larger allotment only when OIT changes the webmail program.
The current client, Sun Java System Messenger Express 6.2, is riddled with problems. Chief among these is a bug that frequently prevents the program from displaying the e-mail inbox. Students trying to access their e-mail are then forced to reload the page again and again until finally the inbox appears properly. The more messages the folder contains, the more pronounced the problem becomes. Therefore, with an increased e-mail quota, it is likely that more and more students will have trouble accessing their e-mail through Webmail. While using programs like Outlook or Thunderbird is an easy fix to the problem on students’ own computers, this bug remains a great inconvenience to people who want to check their messages from other terminals, be it a friend’s laptop or the web kiosks on the 100-level of Frist Campus Center.
The current webmail client has many other flaws. The program, which was last updated in 2004, is not user-friendly, especially when compared with alternatives that provide the functionality and ease-of-use of desktop applications, such as Thunderbird or Outlook. Webmail's search function and sorting capabilities are particularly unpleasant.
OIT must work with the Information Technology Committee to change the webmail client as quickly as possible to ensure that it is at least on par with the options available for free on the internet today. We welcome the introduction of the 1GB email quota, but it must be only the beginning of an aggressive University effort to ensure that Princeton students are well served by a state-of-the-art email system.
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