E-mail reigns supreme as a campus communication tool when information must be exchanged quickly. To ensure smooth delivery, the campus e-mail system will be expanded over the summer.

All campus e-mail now travels through a central server that handles 38,000 e-mail accounts. Additional e-mail servers will be installed to work in conjunction with the current system.

"The goal of this project," says David Zavatson, I.T. Distributed Systems Administrator, "is to move people, who for the most part use the Eudora e-mail program, to other servers. This will allow us to dedicate the central campus e-mail server (Peseta) to people who use Pine for e-mail.

"Improving reliability is our main goal," says Zavatson. "The current system allows e-mail delivery to be managed centrally; however, the problem is that when the central system goes down, nobody gets any mail."

With several separate machines working independently to serve a limited number of users, the flow of e-mail from the other servers will be unaffected if one server goes down.

"I don't want to convey the idea that these servers will only be for a limited segment of the campus community. We will provide enough servers to accommodate all users, but each server will have only a limited number of users on it. We will simply add more servers as needed," says Zavatson.

Based on trends of the past two years, Information Technology expects most students to be using Eudora by Fall 1997.