Tufts Webmail received an upgrade of jumbo proportions last week.
Prior to the upgrade, Tufts students had 50 megabytes (MB) in e-mail space available to them on Webmail before they reached their quota. That number has now quadrupled to 200 MB.
"[Our goal is] to make e-mail as functional and usable for people as possible," Dawn Irish, University Information Technology's (UIT) associate director of outreach, said.
UIT became aware of the community's desire for more e-mail room via user feedback. "We've talked to students in the past and they wanted more space," Irish said.
Melissa O'Connor, the acting manager of the University Systems Group, which is part of UIT, agreed. "We saw more requests for increases in [the] quota," she said.
The upgrade was not costly because it was a reconfiguration of available space, not an expansion of the total available space, O'Connor said.
But this will not be the case with future upgrades. Future additions of space "will be more costly because we have reached our [maximum]," she said.
When the expansion occurred, it was kept relatively quiet; some students were not even aware it occurred. "I didn't notice it," sophomore Jennifer Gerson said.
The decision was made not to publicize the change because there was a concern that students would become excited for the increase and then face problems if implementation failed, according to O'Connor.
There is "so much instability with Webmail that poor publicity would be worse than none," she said.
Now aware of the increase, Gerson thinks that it was a good idea because she has nearly reached her quota in the past. "I actually had gone through and deleted a lot of old mail. It felt like I was getting those stupid e-mails that your mailbox has [almost] reached [its] quota like every other week," she said.
Sophomore David Aaron Friedman has not received such e-mails before, but he also thinks the upgrade will be beneficial. "I've never really had problems before, but increased capacity is a plus," he said.
Irish hopes that more quota space will be provided to Webmail users in the next six to nine months, but is unsure of exactly how much space will be added, when the increases will be made, and how much they will cost.
Future increases may give Webmail more space than at least one of its free competitors - Hotmail currently has 250 MBs of space. But it is still far away from Gmail, which offers around 2.6 gigabytes (GB) and Yahoo! Mail, which offers 1 GB of space.
-Ashley Pandya contributed reporting to this article.
