Ohio State students will no longer have to worry about their Webmail inboxes exceeding capacity.
Beginning Spring Quarter, OSU will offer a new service called Buckeye Mail, which will increase e-mail storage space from 15 megabytes to 10 gigabytes.
Morrison Tower received an early release of the system Monday to see if it will run smoothly.
"We figured we would start off with a smaller group of students and see how it worked out first, before making it available to the entire university," said Catherine Bindewald, director of strategic planning and communications.
The new service, which is the result of a partnership with Microsoft e-mailing system, will allow students to create a calendar of their upcoming events and will offer five gigabytes of workspace devoted to shared project work.
The new system is due, in part, to efforts by Undergraduate Student Government.
"Student government has been encouraging a new e-mail system for years now, due to the storage limitations not meeting the needs of students today," Bindewald said.
USG President Peter Koltak is happy about the victory.
"Any time you're delivering a better product for student use, it is fair to expect people to be happy," Koltak said. "Especially when it is something as important to daily life as e-mail."
Although the system will use all of the same usernames and passwords from the current system, Buckeye Mail is completely separate from Webmail.
"Webmail will only be available until the end of Spring Quarter, and then the new service will take its place," Bindewald said. "Students are invited to move to Buckeye Mail the beginning of Spring Quarter, but everyone will be moved automatically at the end of Spring Quarter."
Students are eager to try the new service.
"I won't have to decide which e-mails are important to keep and which are not," said Brandon King, a communication technology major. "Now I won't have to worry about deleting e-mail all the time."
One of the results of the storage upgrade will be fewer bounced e-mails.
"I think it'll be very beneficial because sometimes I don't receive e-mails because my inbox is too full, and with this new system I won't have problems," said Branden Mack, a communication technology major.
Bindewald said students will receive more information about the new service once they return from Spring Break.
"We listened and responded," Bindewald said. "We hope this will be a great and improved e-mail system for the students."
Kelli Gardner can be reached at gardner.789@osu.edu.
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