The availability of checking osu.edu domains is progressing much slower for main campus students than it is for students attending any of the branch campuses of Ohio State.

Each of the five OSU branch campuses has a link on their Web pages for students, staff and faculty to access Webmail and check e-mail in their OSU account. However, having a link on OSU’s main-campus Web page would be much more difficult because of the number of people who use the computers.

“We will have 100,000 accounts on a single server, which is about 20 times the volume of the branch campuses,” said Charles Morrow-Jones, director of Enterprise Networking at Ohio State.

Main campus students now have the option of using POP service e-mail to download their OSU e-mail into another e-mail account. POP e-mail pulls messages off of the main server when messages are read, making them unavailable from the OSU server and available only in the program to which they were downloaded.

Webmail is a Web-based e-mail client much like Yahoo! or Hotmail. It provides access to Ohio State e-mail accounts from any computer with Internet access.

Webmail provides mail management for users because all e-mail stays on the server until the user instructs the server to delete it.

Morrow-Jones said Ohio State Webmail is expected to be implemented for main-campus access in the 2003 calendar year.

“The idea at the moment is to have the basics first, so someone can walk into any lab and check their mail,” he said.

The university plans to have student correspondence in the form of focus groups or surveys to determine what features students find important in a Web-based e-mail system.

Add-on features like e-mail attachment ability, creating an address book and keeping an e-calendar are some features that may be added onto the Webmail system depending on student feedback.

A mail quota will be imposed with the Webmail system to limit how much mail an individual can store in an OSU account through Webmail.

Pennsylvania State University uses the Webmail system for their 110,000 university e-mail accounts as well. In fact, OSU is discussing the Webmail system with PSU in hopes of mimicking some of the advantages PSU’s system has to offer.

“We saw that we had a very mobile population of students and knew we needed to develop a Web-based e-mail system,” said Chris Hubing, research programmer at Penn State.

Hubing designed the PSU Web-mail system to give users a 100-megabyte storage limit.

The Ohio State Agricultural Technology Institute at Wooster implemented the Webmail system for students and people traveling with their research.

“Many of our students use this as their only e-mail service and they needed a way to check their mail,” said Dr. Hollman, head of Computing and Statistical Services at Ohio Agricultural Research Development Center.

The license agreement gives the Wooster campus a limit of 2,500 accessible accounts, leaving their e-mail service available to OSU students, faculty and staff of the Wooster campus only.

Before Webmail, students at the Wooster campus received a floppy disk at the beginning of each quarter to save e-mail from campus computer centers.

The Newark campus of Ohio State has Webmail accessibility available for all Central Ohio Technical College registered students. COTC shares the Newark campus with Ohio State.

Autumn quarter is the projected goal of Webmail being available to OSU students at the Newark campus.

Don Marchlenski, Manager of Operations and Development at the Newark campus, said they are working with the main campus to develop a system only to be used by registered OSU Newark campus students. This will prevent exceeding licensing agreements by students from other OSU campuses using the Webmail system.

The Marion campus of Ohio State has a link on its Web site to the Delaware Center where Marion campus students can access their OSU e-mail via Webmail.

Along with an overhaul of the e-mail system at Oho State in the past few years, people with OSU e-mail accounts can keep their OSU accounts for life. This does not make the Webmail system available to users forever, but it allows OSU mail to be forwarded to another e-mail address.

Bob Kalal, Director of Policy and Chief Information Officer for the Office of Information Technology at Ohio State, said the lifelong e-mail service was started as a service for the Alumni Association as a valuable correspondence tool between alumni and the university.

Ohio State Webmail will be an addition to the current e-mail services of the university, so using POP e-mail will still be an option for students.