CardMail outages plague students, require solution

April 24, 2006 —

Facing a frustrated group of students at the Technology Open Forum on April 13, Ken Schindler, director of Information Technology Services, explained that CardMail usage has nearly doubled in the last year despite only a marginal increase in new user accounts. This rise in usage has apparently been the primary cause of the University's e-mail system outages. Since the forum, full performance has still not returned.

What makes the CardMail system's instability so frustrating is that e-mail has become vital to the education process. The integration between curriculum and technology has developed so much that it is common for homework to be assigned and submitted electronically. Blackboard and similar systems have become popular on campus, but the bulk of these activities still use CardMail.

In fact, communication between students and professors outside of the classroom is now almost exclusively done through e-mail. Although faculty members use a separate e-mail system, GroupWise, they still rely on CardMail for students to receive messages. And despite recent upgrades, the GroupWise system has also been experiencing technical problems.

If it hasn't already happened, the downtime associated with CardMail outages could result in missed deadlines or lost assignments. Without confirmation that e-mails have been received, students are often left worrying about the fate of their required assignments. And while unreliability afflicts all students, less honorable students will have no problem extorting the situation and pretending that CardMail ate their homework. Unfortunately, professors cannot even validate these claims because CardMail outages are rarely publicly announced.

Dealing with CardMail's problems is certainly no minor task for the ITS staff. It is impossible to test the complete effects of upgrades after they are performed late at night. Similarly, there is no way to emulate the cumulative effect of thousands of students logging in to check their e-mail. Throughout the last few months ITS has been left putting out fires as they are reported. This reliance has undoubtedly resulted in lengthier CardMail downtime since most students assume that someone else has already reported outages.

Although Schindler did not speculate on causes for the double in CardMail usage, not all of it can be traced to academic purposes. Spam is definitely one possibiltiy, as e-mail boxes continue to fill with unsolicited messages. But another possibility is much more probable and much more familiar to students. Facebook's skyrocketing popularity on campus results in dozens of e-mails when students request friends, write on walls, and publicize events.

Generally, technology improves and develops quickly. With a system that has been used for as long as CardMail has, frequent outages are shocking and unacceptable. If the software behind CardMail is no longer able to provide stability, ITS should look at other options. Clearly, the University should not expect the level of usage to do anything but increase when students return in the fall. The cost of a new system might be high, but the threshold of pain has already been reached.