The School of Arts and Sciences e-mail system aggravated College students for the fourth time this semester when it went down Sunday night.
Although SAS Information Technology Executive Director Ira Winston did not know exactly what time the system went down, he confirmed that Sunday's outage affected all SAS e-mail users.
"The system went down for a few hours [on Sunday] night, but was up and running again at 7:30 a.m.," he said.
Though this is the fourth SAS e-mail disruption since the beginning of the year, none of the other undergraduate schools have faced major e-mail disruptions.
However, Winston said Sunday's problem was unrelated to previous outages. Rather, he said, it had to do with programming for inbox quota updates that should be completed over winter break.
He added that no further advanced programming will occur this semester, so the system should remain stable.
While there will be some outages over the break as the new system is being implemented, these will be scheduled and students will receive advance notification.
Sunday's crash was directly related to these upcoming changes.
"The cause of the problem was a corrupted file that resulted from a programming error in some new code that was written to improve the quota situation," Winston said. "To fix the problem, the corrupted file was removed and regenerated."
After the planned winter break updates, SAS students will have 65 megabytes of mailbox space instead of 35.
Winston said that Sunday's outage was not due to a flaw in the SAS e-mail system. He added that there is always the risk of programming errors and potential outages when new code is written.
For this reason, SAS computing is putting off its most dramatic changes until this summer.
"One of the reasons we want to do the major upgrade during a summer is to avoid making changes during the semester when stability is a greater concern," he said.
Whatever the cause, College students find the persistent outages to be an inconvenience.
"It was a little disruptive because I needed to pull an essay off my inbox," College freshman Greg Capobianco said. "It was annoying."
Some, however, find the SAS e-mail system to be so cumbersome that they avoid using it altogether.
"I just have my e-mail forwarded to Gmail," College junior Kara Dewhurst said, citing Google's e-mail service. "It's just easier."
