With so many Dartmouth students conducting the majority of their correspondences over BlitzMail, inboxes have been filling to the 20 megabyte capacity quickly. To deal with this issue, Computer Services has announced that starting Tuesday the storage quota for BlitzMail will be increased to 500 megabytes.
According to Steve Cochran '05, special project manager for Computer Services, 500 megabytes should be large enough to accommodate the further growth of BlitzMail.
"As time has progressed, people complained that the 20 megabyte limit has become very restrictive," Cochran said. "There have been a few increases in the quota in the past, but the change will be substantial now."
Users will not be able to send messages if they have more than 600 megabytes of information in their inboxes, but will still be able to receive them.
Not only will the overall quota increase, but the limit on the size of each message will be increased from 20 megabytes to 40 megabytes, Cochran said, so students will be able to receive larger messages and attachments.
To allow for the increase in storage, computer services has upgraded its mail servers and connected them to Dartmouth's storage area network. The disks on this network will increase the current capacity as well as also allow flexibility to accommodate growth in the future.
"Before, we were limited by the size of the individual servers," Cochran said, "but we now have the technical setup to make the increase possible."
The new e-mail storage quota will apply to all central mail servers on campus. Although the increase in the quota will undoubtedly be a relief to many students, it is uncertain how much of an impact the change will actually make.
"The messages [about being over the 20 megabyte limit] are really annoying, but I don't think they actually affect my use of BlitzMail," Sarah Parkinson '09 said.
Adam Michaelson '06, however, has been getting notifications about the number of messages in his inbox since freshman year and is glad that the quota is being increased.
"Now my computer won't tell me that I've exceeded my mailbox quota," Michaelson said, "and I won't get depressed anymore."
