Users of Tufts' Webmail service may have noticed a significant increase in the size of their e-mail inboxes Thursday night after the University Information Technology (UIT) staff raised storage quotas from 200 to 500 megabytes.
This most recent addition marked a tenfold increase in quotas in recent months, the result of UIT's continuing effort to expand the capacity of its e-mail servers, and followed an increase from 50 MB to 200 last March.
The effort is a response to a growing number of requests from users for more space, according to UIT's Associate Director of Outreach Dawn Irish. "We've conducted a number of feedback groups," she said. "We've heard again and again that Tufts' e-mail quotas were not high enough to support all of the uses that Tufts students wanted."
While UIT was able to simply reallocate existing space for March's upgrade, last week's change had to involve a server upgrade, according to Irish.
She said that these upgrades are "routine" and although she did not have a specific timetable for future upgrades, she said that UIT will likely increase e-mail capacity again within the next few years "depending on how we see usage going."
In the meantime, many students may find that 500 MG is enough, as most text e-mails weigh only a few kilobytes (one one-thousandth of a MB). With that level of storage, users could save over 165,000 Facebook e-mail notifications (3 kB), 60,000 letters from University President Lawrence Bacow (8 kB) or 640 attachments of "Pride and Prejudice" in PDF format (780 kB).
Other users can fill that space relatively easily, however, as sending e-mails that include photos and other large attachments is relatively common.
Senior Ashley Bethel said that, in her experience, it is fairly easy for students to reach their quotas.
"When you are a part of student organizations, there is a lot of e-mail and a lot of corresponding with professors that you don't want to delete," she said.
Bethel also said she had missed at least one important e-mail due to a full mailbox, and was considering setting up an account with Gmail, Google's free e-mail service.
"I don't think I need to anymore," she said, noting that the recent update should be sufficient.
According to Irish, the fact that many students have opted to use free external e-mail services such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Hotmail instead of Tufts' Trumpeter Webmail is another reason for the quota increase.
"If students are using other e-mail accounts and not checking or forwarding their Tufts e-mail, they may be losing out on important information," she wrote later in an e-mail.
Jeff Wasilko, team leader and e-mail system administrator at UIT, agreed that there are advantages to using a Tufts e-mail account as opposed to one of the external services.
"For every 500 MB of space allocated to a student, 2 GB of storage is reserved on Tufts' systems so that the valuable data contained in e-mail is adequately backed-up," he said. He also pointed out that Trumpeter's maximum attachment size is 32 MB (or 100 MB if using a desktop e-mail client), significantly higher than those of most free e-mail services.
And if students are worried about quotas on Webmail but don't want to delete e-mails, Irish said that they can download Tufts' customized version of Mozilla Thunderbird, a popular free desktop e-mail client, from UIT's Web site.
"Using this client, you can easily create local folders for messages you wish to keep so that they are accessible, but no longer take up space on the mail server," she said in the e-mail.
