When Tufts University webmail -- known to techies as Trumpeter - goes down, members of the Tufts community are prone to panic.
Yesterday, students and faculty members were unable to access their university e-mail accounts for approximately three and a half hours.
On a Tuesday afternoon at Tufts, that translates into a serious and potentially detrimental problem for campus wide communication for students as well as faculty.
Papers, resumes, and cover letters are only a few of the important documents that zip through cyberspace on an hourly basis at Tufts, where the speed and efficiency of the World Wide Web has greatly enhanced our abilities to communicate effectively.
The temporary malfunction at Trumpeter, however, is only one of a series of grievances that students have encountered with the e-mail service.
Compared to the streamlined, user-friendly interface of the popular
Gmail.com, Tufts webmail offers its users a rather schlocky alternative.
Gmail.com further one-ups Trumpeter by automatically saving drafts as the e-mailer composes the e-mail; the ardent Gmail-er knows that such a feature is a virtual life-saver when wireless fails or viruses interrupt at crucial times.
While webmail now automatically saves sent e-mail on its server, the saved e-mail has only increased the number of e-mails taking up the user's storage space.
Tufts webmail offers students and faculty significantly fewer megabytes of storage compared to other e-mail services: 50 megabytes to Gmail's 2777 (and counting)-megabytes.
The vast amount of storage available at Gmail.com allows its users to keep virtually every e-mail read, written, or even ignored.
Such a comprehensive personal archive is undoubtedly most useful to the Tufts student who receives a slew of e-mails from professors, the administration, social organizations, and possible job opportunities all at once.
For these reasons, many Tufts students have already made the shift to more reliable e-mail services, forwarding university e-mail to the intuitive and -- let's just say it -- more aesthetically pleasing home that Gmail provides.
Webmail has, however, shown signs of modernization. At the beginning of every month, users are given a series of options which allow them to organize their e-mail into a clean archive.
Last January, the available storage more than doubled, from 20 to 50 megabytes.
An increased quota, however, has only allowed students more time to accumulate e-mail which will eventually have to be deleted.
E-mails are no longer the simple, text-only documents that they first were, and multimedia attachments and elaborate HTML compositions are commonly relayed from inbox to inbox.
As a result, the size of files being transferred over the internet has greatly and inevitably increased, and this demand can only be accommodated by storage space beyond the allotted 50 megabytes.
For the Tufts senior in particular, more room would allow for a student to accumulate a comprehensive archive of important academic and job-related material without having to worry about mistaken deletes.
In terms of e-mail composition, Trumpeter should strive to ensure that the experience of writing e-mails is secured in the same way as is the experience of reading old e-mails.
The automatic saving of in-progress drafts would further quell a university student's potential technological woes.
Of course, Gmail.com is the product of Google.com, the internet's foremost innovator of convenient and notoriously user-friendly service, and it is therefore unreasonable to expect Trumpeter to offer its users limitless space and cutting-edge organizational features.
Nevertheless, the presence of alternative e-mail services only makes the inadequacies of Trumpeter more glaringly obvious. Since electronic communication has become so important to the members of its community, Tufts can do a better job of staying abreast of user demand.
