Although commercial electronic mail giants are already offering gigabyte-sized e-mail boxes for their clients, it is unlikely that Penn students will have that luxury any time soon.
Universities, unlike commercial companies, typically have much less money to spend on upgrading services past bare necessities.
Gmail, Google's popular e-mail service, offers free storage capacity of up to one gigabyte. MSN, Yahoo! and ICQ have all rolled out similar services with a two gigabyte limit, but for a yearly fee.
"Google is rolling in money right now, so soon after its initial public offering. It can afford to do that kind of thing," said John Yates, director of Workstation Services for Penn's School of Arts and Sciences. "On the other hand, we have budget constraints."
Most Penn e-mail servers, including Wharton Computing services and those under Yates' supervision, offer a disk space quota of 15 to 50 megabytes, compared to the 40 to 100 megabyte quotas at other Ivy League institutions.
"Our main concern is to provide e-mail so people can do their work. The question is, are we offering something adequate already, or would we just be pouring money in?" Yates said.
Currently, Yates' SAS servers support almost 19,000 students and staff and can handle up to 21,000 accounts.
Yates concedes that upgrading e-mail quotas is a possibility.
"We're always working to maintain our customer needs. If in [the] future, higher quotas are necessary, we can possibly expand, but purchasing disk space is not cheap. Especially for so many people," Yates said.
Workstation Services Manager Jim Noonan pointed out that the dean has the authority to make any final decisions regarding increases in disk space quota.
"We're constrained by money questions, but if the dean decides we want to go that way, it won't be that much of a problem," Noonan said.
In the meantime, SAS Computing has been continuing to upgrade its virus and spam filter capabilities.
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