Students in the College of Arts and Sciences can look forward to larger inboxes.
A proposal to increase the maximum storage allowance for e-mails was passed on Friday.
This upgrade -- the first in nearly four years -- is set to take place over winter break and will increase the total e-mail quota for College students to 65 megabytes from its current level of 35 MB.
"When everyone comes back for spring semester, it will be done," College Dean Dennis DeTurck said. "That's a done deal."
He added that in addition to the increase in storage space, administrators are exploring the possibility of an upgrade to the Webmail software used to access e-mails.
Each school at Penn is responsible for the provision and maintenance of e-mail services for its own students and faculty and determines how much storage space is allocated to its users.
Though the planned upgrade will finally bring inboxes for College students in line with the 50 MB offered to Wharton students, it will still fall short of the 250 MB allocated to those in the Engineering school.
Nursing students are presently allowed a maximum storage of 15 MB, though the possibility of an increase is currently being discussed in the Nursing computing department.
However, School of Arts and Sciences IT Executive Director Ira Winston feels that it is unreasonable to compare disk quotas allocated to students across the different schools at Penn.
He added that Engineering students have higher quotas because in addition to e-mail, they also use their allocated disk space to store lab work -- which often involves much larger file sizes.
"It's not comparing apples to apples," he said.
Though Penn e-mail storage quotas are competitive with those offered by other Ivy League schools, even after the upgrade they will not measure up to the 2.5 gigabytes offered by Google with its free "Gmail" service.
And don't expect Penn to adopt Google-sized inboxes any time soon.
"We are definitely not going to increase to those levels," Winston said. "For us to compete with a company with the kind of resources that Google has is impossible."
However, following Columbia University's decision to launch a $500,000 revamp of its "archaic" e-mail system -- a move that will provide Columbia students with in-boxes more than six times their current size -- some think it is time for Penn to follow suit.
DeTurck said that the possibility of replacing Penn's existing e-mail infrastructure is being seriously considered.
"The kind of system we have right now isn't amenable to infinite expansion in terms of quotas," he said. "We would have to go to a whole different kind of system."
"That is one of the options we are looking at," DeTurck said, in reference to the possibility of an upgrade similar to the one being undertaken at Columbia.
However, he said that any such change would not take place during the semester.
"Major changes can't realistically be implemented until next summer because we don't want to sacrifice reliability," he said.
He also emphasized that before such a move is taken, there needs to be a discussion -- in which students would be involved -- about whether it would be the best way to spend that kind of money.
"I try not to make very many decisions without consulting the people that they are going to affect," he said.
DeTurck added that an alternative under serious consideration is the possibility of outsourcing Penn's e-mail service to a commercial provider like Gmail.
"It would allow students to take advantage of a state-of-the-art e-mail system," DeTurck said. "We could then take the money that we would have invested in e-mail equipment and do something else."
Although some smaller schools have undertaken similar initiatives, such a move would be unprecedented among other Ivies or peer institutions, DeTurck said.
For some students, any additional e-mail storage space would be welcome.
"I definitely think we need more space," College senior Brian Wu said.
However, for others, a larger in-box is not a high priority.
"Students tend to have a lot [of] junk e-mails saved." College senior Alex Buznego said. "Extra space would be a luxury, but it's definitely not necessary."
