Tuesday, October 25, 2005
BamaMail still not perfect
October 10, 2005
You know what's a lot of money? $8.1 million.
It's what "A History of Violence" made at the box office last week. In Major League Baseball, it's what Tim Hudson, Julio Franco and Brian Jordan of the Atlanta Braves made together this year. In the NFL, Chargers quarterback Drew Brees or Colts running back Edgerrin James could start on your team for $8.1 million.
For a university, though, $8.1 million just doesn't go as far as it used to.
myBama, the one-stop Internet portal that most of us have grown to dislike, cost that much, and we still haven't seen a solid return on the University's investment. It's expensive, sure, but if that's the going rate to replace a creaky system like Tide Navigator and Tide Guide, then we'll just have to accept it.
What we won't accept, however, is a shoddy e-mail system, and UA officials did something about that last week when they brought back BamaMail on a permanent basis. The old e-mail system had been running in place of myBama's e-mail function since the system crashed earlier this year.
It's telling that myBama actually made BamaMail look good. While we've longed for it ever since it was banished, BamaMail still has its flaws. The system tends to time out at inopportune times and users can lose hours of work. It's not as technologically advanced as other e-mail clients, and BamaMail inboxes tend to be choked with spam. Still, it was better than the hard-to-use, slow-loading myBama e-mail system.
Since it's back for the foreseeable future, we'd like to suggest some improvements to BamaMail. After fixing the spam and timing out issues, let's work on making the system better.
For a model, Web e-mail just doesn't get any better than Gmail, Google's e-mail system. It's user friendly, the interface is clean and the system is lightning fast. While it's not entirely fair to compare the leviathan Google to the University and its relatively limited resources, we could still import a few Gmail concepts for use in BamaMail.
The easiest and most important upgrade would be more space. The nature of e-mail has changed over the past few years. Now, we're sending pictures, videos and other files to each other via e-mail. The limited space on BamaMail isn't accommodating e-mail's growth.
While not everyone that uses the system fills up their inbox, those that do should be able to petition the University for an appreciable increase in space.
In the 21st century, we, as college students of a major university, have the right to a university e-mail address for the ease of campus-wide communication.
We also have the right to a functioning e-mail system.
Source: http://www.cw.ua.edu/
You know what's a lot of money? $8.1 million.
It's what "A History of Violence" made at the box office last week. In Major League Baseball, it's what Tim Hudson, Julio Franco and Brian Jordan of the Atlanta Braves made together this year. In the NFL, Chargers quarterback Drew Brees or Colts running back Edgerrin James could start on your team for $8.1 million.
For a university, though, $8.1 million just doesn't go as far as it used to.
myBama, the one-stop Internet portal that most of us have grown to dislike, cost that much, and we still haven't seen a solid return on the University's investment. It's expensive, sure, but if that's the going rate to replace a creaky system like Tide Navigator and Tide Guide, then we'll just have to accept it.
What we won't accept, however, is a shoddy e-mail system, and UA officials did something about that last week when they brought back BamaMail on a permanent basis. The old e-mail system had been running in place of myBama's e-mail function since the system crashed earlier this year.
It's telling that myBama actually made BamaMail look good. While we've longed for it ever since it was banished, BamaMail still has its flaws. The system tends to time out at inopportune times and users can lose hours of work. It's not as technologically advanced as other e-mail clients, and BamaMail inboxes tend to be choked with spam. Still, it was better than the hard-to-use, slow-loading myBama e-mail system.
Since it's back for the foreseeable future, we'd like to suggest some improvements to BamaMail. After fixing the spam and timing out issues, let's work on making the system better.
For a model, Web e-mail just doesn't get any better than Gmail, Google's e-mail system. It's user friendly, the interface is clean and the system is lightning fast. While it's not entirely fair to compare the leviathan Google to the University and its relatively limited resources, we could still import a few Gmail concepts for use in BamaMail.
The easiest and most important upgrade would be more space. The nature of e-mail has changed over the past few years. Now, we're sending pictures, videos and other files to each other via e-mail. The limited space on BamaMail isn't accommodating e-mail's growth.
While not everyone that uses the system fills up their inbox, those that do should be able to petition the University for an appreciable increase in space.
In the 21st century, we, as college students of a major university, have the right to a university e-mail address for the ease of campus-wide communication.
We also have the right to a functioning e-mail system.
Source: http://www.cw.ua.edu/
