Webmail beta-testing offers more space

For 10,000 IU students, Webmail is about to get a little more spacious. IU will switch students who signed up for beta-testing to a new, bigger and safer system beginning next week.\nRick Jackson, manager of messaging for University Information Technology Services, said the new system will look just like the old one to IU students, except it will have more than eight times the quota and a number of behind-the-scenes upgrades. \n"The big thing is they will get a 100-megabyte quota," he said. "It's a much larger mailbox, but other than that the front end is the same as today. We're not changing that at this point."\nFreshman Clayton Johnson signed up to be a beta tester for the promise of increased space.\n"I may not use (the added space) now, but possibly in the future," Johnson said. "(It's) just in case I need it."\nBeneath the surface, however, Jackson said the new Webmail will have an environment better equipped to deal with potential problems, thanks to a backup storage network in Indianapolis. \n"The new environment has a much higher tolerance to server outages or disasters," he said. "If something happens to the machine room here, we could be back in production within 72 hours."\nThat, Jackson said, will completely eliminate lengthy outages, like the week-long disruption that took out an e-mail server last October.\n"It's a lot less likely we would have the kind of outage like last fall when IMAP4 went down," he said. "That should never happen in this environment."\nAlong with the increased quota, the new system will also allow for receiving bigger attachments. The old limit of eight megabytes will be bumped to 30, Jackson said.\n"It's the way people are using e-mail today," Jackson said of the larger quotas. "Now, the mailbox size is so small that two messages could put a mailbox over quota."\nSophomore Gabriela Iglesias decided to sign up out of curiosity as well as for more space. \n"I just wanted to check it out and see what it was," she said. "Plus, I saw it gave you 100 megabytes. I'm probably not going to use them all, but why not try it?"\nThe beta testers will be the first 10,000 to be moved to the new system, but everyone will begin to be added starting in early April. At that time, IU's Shakespeare systems and Pine client will no longer work. \nFor those who haven't signed up yet, Jackson said there were about 2,000 slots still available. Students can sign up before logging in at https://webmail.iu.edu/bl. Jackson said that cut-off will stand, at least for now, even if more students were interested in testing the new system.\n"Depending on how things go, we'll probably open it up again to encourage people to move over to the new system," he said. "The more we move now, the fewer we have to move later."\n-- Contact Staff Writer Gavin Lesnick at glesnick@indiana.edu.