A new e-mail system, made available to all students and faculty last week, is causing significant delays in e-mail delivery at UW-Madison.
According to Brian Rust, communications director of the Division of Information Technology, the issue should be resolved by today.
The problem is an indirect result of DoIT officials installing an increased number of servers with the new e-mail system, to trouble-shoot for this type of problem in which the breakdown of one server has visible results for users. When taking down one of the old servers that controlled outbound routing for e-mail, Rust said, officials moved its information to a different server, but in the process, delivery of many e-mail messages stopped.
\As far as I know, the latest is that they fixed the other server and things are returning to normal, but we still have a backlog of messages,"" Rust said.
E-mails sent by professors to a list of students, for example, may not yet have been received by all students. All messages will eventually end up in their intended locations though, Rust said.
Jessalyn Nauertz, a UW-Madison freshman, said she had been having major problems with her student e-mail account in the last couple of days. There has been a two-or three-day lapse between when people e-mailed her and when she actually received the e-mail, Nauertz said.
Each year, the university's e-mail system has a budget of about $700,000 for maintenance and upkeep, Rust said. With the new system, one-time equipment purchases totaled $230,000 but other than that, there has not been a major increase in costs.
DoIT officials have also implemented better virus-tracking systems that will reduce viruses that come from outside the university. Viruses that are sent within the UW-Madison community are still a problem, though.
""We're still working on implementing virus and spam controls with the university system,"" Rust said.
Everyone has the option of utilizing the new e-mail system that uses a wisc.edu address rather than the former students.wisc.edu or facstaff.wisc.edu addresses but no one is required to use it.
The new Web-based system offers users about 50 megabytes of storage whereas a typical Web-based system, such as Hotmail, offers approximately two megabytes of storage. Users can also read their mail on the server or download it onto the computer.
