KATHY MILLAR
Living Assistant
For senior Julie Serber, Pepperdine’s limited e-mail storage space has been a growing problem, especially since she is receiving important e-mails from potential employers. Serber said she has exceeded her mailbox limit about 12 times over the years and was eventually forced to open a Gmail account to handle much of her online communication.
“I do wish I could save my deleted mail and not fill up my mailbox to the max. I wish there was a way to archive things, like Gmail,” Serber said.
Serber said she worries about what has happened to important e-mails when her Pep Xpress mailbox was full.
“Is there any way of knowing if you haven’t received a message?” Serber said, “Also, I wonder about when my mailbox was closed, what messages I’ve missed.”
In spite of increasing reliance on Facebook as a mode of messaging, Pepperdine students still rely on e-mail as a vital means of communication. E-mail is even more important for seniors, who are sending out resumes, and for students who are studying abroad and depend on e-mail to stay in touch with their friends at other campuses and family members across the globe.
Senior Matt Laubacher has also had problems with his Pepperdine e-mail account over the years, but he said the most difficult time to use PepXpress was when he was studying abroad in Heidelberg from 2003-2004.
“When I was trying to send pictures back and forth with my family in Heidelberg, I had to use a separate e-mail account because Pepperdine’s e-mail couldn’t hold the pictures,” Laubacher said.
This especially affected Laubacher when he was trying to receive Christmas pictures from his family. He found a way around his Pepperdine Xpress e-mail problems though, by posting his photos on a Web site and using a Yahoo account to send and receive pictures.
Serber said she, too, still counts PepXpress as her main e-mail server and uses Gmail just for sending and receiving large files.
“I want to keep the ‘pepperdine.edu’ after my name,” Serber said. “I don’t want to deal with the hassle of telling everyone I know, ‘This is my new e-mail.’”
Serber’s and Laubacher’s experiences with the PepXpress e-mail system are typical among Pepperdine students, faculty and staff. By the time a message has been passed from Yahoo to Gmail to Whalemail and back again to PepXpress, the touted convenience of the Internet becomes questionable to frustrated net users like Serber and Laubacher.
The myriad of confusing steps it can take to manage this vital form of communication have led to many a panicked phone call to Pepperdine’s Information Technology department. IT officials say there is at least some help on the way, but they encourage PepXpress users to do their part now by rethinking their use of the PepXpess e-mail server.
One improvement on Pepperdine’s e-mail system is already underway. Candace Jones, the university portal manager for Pepperdine’s e-mail system, said in an e-mail interview that she is overseeing the implementation of the new PeopleSoft portal, an e-mail service provider, which will replace Pepperdine’s current e-mail portal in August.
This new e-mail service will offer users a host of new features, including a new forum called a Collaborative Workspace, an online area in which students and faculty can interact with other portal users as well as create special storage spaces.
“The Collaborative Workspace feature is built on a content management solution, so when a user uploads a document, it keeps track of versions and changes,” Jones said. “This feature may help with students needing to send documents through e-mail. Instead, students could create a secure location – almost like a digital backpack-to store documents, collaborate, and track changes.”
However, Jones said though this new portal will enhance many of Pepperdine’s online functions, the e-mail is not stored within the portal, so the size of the storage space in each mailbox will stay the same.
“If there are issues related to e-mail inbox size limits, those need to be addressed with Information Technology,” Jones said. “Perhaps a student advisory panel could be convened by the Dean of Students Office to help address this and other technology related issues.”
Kathee Robings, the Information Security officer and senior director of Data Services at Pepperdine’s IT Department, is responsible for much of the management of Pepperdine’s e-mail system. She said Pepperdine does not have enough disc space to meet the demand for students to store e-mails and documents in their e-mailboxes.
“I will openly share that we are at the lower end in terms of mail storage size. Some schools have 10 megabytes — we’re at 20 megabytes. So we’re currently not the lowest, but there are some schools that have around 100 megabytes,” Robings said.
“We have a finite amount of disk space. We can add to it, but it’s expensive,” Robings added.
While Pepperdine provides only 20 megabytes of storage space to students, Google’s Gmail accounts offer more than 2700 megabytes of space. When Sophomore Charles Wang compares his PepperdineXPress account to other freely offered e-mail accounts, he said he becomes upset. Wang uses his PepperdineXpress e-mail account frequently to communicate with his professors, but says since his freshman year he has been constrained by PepXpress’ e-mail storage space.
“Ever since the second semester of last year I’ve been over my exceeded limit,” Wang said. “Even now, I cut down a lot, and it’s still sending me that message.”
IT Department gets constant getting requests to increase their e-mailbox size because e-mails are not being discarded or saved on a hard drive expediently, according to Robings.
“I think that the root of that issue is that e-mail systems are communication delivery systems. They are not document management systems- that is not what they are designed to do,” Robings said.
She also said one of the reasons that Pepperdine provides such a limited amount of e-mail storage space is due to the free lifetime e-mail accounts that are offered to Pepperdine alumni. In addition, Pepperdine does not terminate e-mail accounts for any students who have taken time off from Pepperdine until after a year of absence.
Robings said there is the option to shorten the inactivity period before deleting an account to provide more storage space to active e-mail users. However, this would require more discussion as to whether or not that is would be the best solution.
Senior Kurtis Shaner, who has worked at ResNet for two and a half years, recommended in an e-mail interview that people using the PepperdineXpress e-mail system utilize an e-mail client, such as Microsoft Office, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mac OS CX e-mail client or Microsoft Entourage.
“If you use an e-mail program to do your email, depending on how you set it up you can have all e-mail downloaded to your computer and deleted from the e-mail server when you delete or move it in your e-mail program,” Shaner said.
Shaner said he uses his Gmail account for persona e-mails, while he continues to use Pepperdine e-mail for school-related communication.
Meanwhile, Robings is open to hearing student opinions about Pepperdine’s e-mail technology.
“I would be more than happy to put together a focus group with student represented to address the e-mailbox size,” Robings said. “IT’s job is to support the needs of the community. We want to make sure we are meeting their needs.”
Serber said she believes this idea has merit, since so many students share similar outlooks when it comes to PepXpress.
“A focus group would probably be successful provided that they did it in a timely manner and asked the right questions,” Serber said. “I think they could get some good results from that.”
03-23-2006