WebMail woes to wither away
Relief for slow WebMail speeds is on the way but it may cause some students to lose important e-mails.
The Utah State University Helpdesk recently announced a new program that could improve the speed of student WebMail accounts. The program will go through student accounts each month and delete all e-mail messages that are older than 30 days. The program will only delete those messages in the inbox, outbox and trash folders.
Slow WebMail speeds have been experienced for about a month now. While some of the blame has been placed on the MyDoom virus that circulated last month, it is the high number of e-mail messages stored on students’ accounts that are bogging down servers, said Bob Bayn, associate director of Network and Computing Services.
“It appears that once you get in the range of 10,000 messages in the new mail folder, then especially WebMail just won’t function acceptably at all,” Bayn said. “We have found accounts with up to 50,000 messages.”
Bayn said the accounts with high numbers of e-mails in the inbox are typically owned by students who rarely use the account and let it pile up with spam e-mail.
“Before the MyDoom virus hit, we were getting in the neighborhood of 100,000 to 150,000 e-mail messages on a nice busy day,” Bayn said. “Since the MyDoom virus started spreading around, we have never gotten that few messages.”
Bayn said there are as many as 300,000 e-mails being sent from campus accounts each day.
Last week an e-mail was sent to USU students informing them about the program to delete e-mail messages.
Bayn said it would be preferable for students to delete their e-mails themselves, to ensure that nothing important is removed.
“The student can do a better job of deciding what’s unneeded,” Bayn said.
There are other factors that contribute to slow speeds with WebMail, Bayn said.
“WebMail works much better earlier in the day but as more users start using it, the performance for everybody deteriorates,” he said.
Until recently, it was expected for there to be up to 2,000 simultaneous users logged in to WebMail, Bayn said, but there have been as many as 4,000 users at once in past weeks.
“Part of that is that as people try and give up [on loading WebMail] they remain connected until the WebMail server times out their connection,” Bayn said. “That’s why we have the recommendation to logout on the WebMail page.”
Bayn said users logging out is something that helps everybody else.
“Logging out is an altruistic thing to do, it’s a thing that you want everyone else to have done when you go in to read WebMail,” he said. “But it’s the thing that takes you time at the end to have done.”
Besides deleting old e-mail and logging out, Bayn said, there are other methods students can help out.
“It is better for [students] to use their own client that they can configure for themselves,” Bayn said.
Students with their own computers can use programs like Microsoft Outlook Express to receive their e-mail from the CC server. The e-mail is downloaded to their computer and the computer is then disconnected from the server, making everything seamless.
Associated Students of USU Student Advocate Les Essig said WebMail has been one of the biggest complaints he has received from students.
“It’s a huge frustration for students around campus,” he said. “Some students are probably going to be upset because some of their e-mails are going to be deleted.”
With students having the power to save the e-mails they want to keep into other folders, however, it shouldn’t be a big problem, Essig said.
“It will definitely help to speed up WebMail.”
More information about the program to delete their e-mail and information on other programs offered by the Helpdesk is available on the Helpdesk Web site at http://helpdesk.usu.edu.
“We’d just as soon have the user make the decisions of their mail,” Bayn said.
-str@cc.usu.edu