Individuals who have registered Webmail woes with the Office of Information Technology are not alone, as problems have followed the e-mail server throughout the semester and affected many netIDs.
"It is a rare day when my Duke e-mail functions 'normally' throughout a business day," John Thompson, professor of history and director of graduate studies for the history department wrote in an e-mail sent from his Gmail account. Thompson said his Webmail has been inaccessible for three 24-to-48 hour periods this semester, and he has experienced numerous other delays and problems since August this year.
Steve O'Donnell, senior communications strategist for OIT, wrote in an e-mail that problems developed in one of the University's four e-mail servers on the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 18.
"Beginning Tuesday evening, one of Duke's four mail servers encountered a bug which caused the system to restart repeatedly," he said. "In this case, the issue was caused by a bug in the file system for the Solaris Operating System, which runs the mail servers."
Sun Microsystems is the company that provides Duke's Webmail servers. O'Donnell said the server affected was the one that houses accounts with NetIDs starting with letters "G" through "M."
Part of the cause of the intermittent problems may be the financial woes currently facing Sun Microsystems. The Silicon Valley-based telecommunications company plans to cut 5,000 to 6,000 workers-between 15 and 18 percent of its workforce-in one of the biggest layoffs in the industry, the San Jose Mercury News reported Nov. 14.
Janet Ewald, associate professor of history, said she has experienced repeated difficulties with Webmail as well: in August, October and in the past week.
"My sense is that it has been the new server that has caused the difficulties," she said.
O'Donnell said OIT, in conjunction with Sun Microsystems, manually shut down the system and was able to stabilize the Webmail servers in the most recent outage by last Thursday afternoon. The office received approximately 340 Webmail-related complaints problems during the outage.
He added that after the system was fixed, users accessing Webmail through an e-mail client such as Mozilla Thunderbird continued to have problems which OIT has worked to address. O'Donnell said no e-mails from any accounts were lost during this period.
For junior Katie Kimrey, the outage was no more than a minor nuisance.
"Thursday, [Webmail] was working slow but it still worked," she said. "It never completely went out for me."
Kimrey added that she has not had major problems over the semester, and has not had any more difficulties since the recent outage was remedied.
Others, however, said the problem has been mostly an inconvenience.
Thompson said the recent outage affected 11 out of 36 regular faculty members in the history department, preventing professors from receiving and responding to student e-mails, sending out electronic letters of recommendation, grading assignments and keeping up professional correspondence. Thompson added that he expects law school admissions officers to be suspicious or skeptical about letters of recommendation sent from the Gmail address he has switched to.
Dr. Margaret Humphreys, professor of history and associate clinical professor of medicine, wrote in an e-mail that she has generally had trouble accessing her Webmail this semester.
"This ought to be straightforward, bread-and-butter e-mail system stuff," she said. "Hasn't our vendor organized a college e-mail system before?"
Humphreys added that she has also had problems with the advice she has received from OIT concerning how to solve her Webmail problems.
"Once when my access to the shared mailbox had disappeared, the OIT guy told me how to restore the prior setting and yes, I could get in," she said. "What he didn't tell me was that now the mailbox would not take new deliveries."
Ewald said, however, that she has been consistently pleased with the service she has received from OIT personnel in the service department. But she said she has been unimpressed with communication from higher-level OIT officers.
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O'Donnell said OIT has worked not only to fix specific outages, but to ensure the security and effectiveness of the system in the future.
"We are in direct connection with people at the highest levels at Sun to ensure that their engineers are focused on our ongoing issues with the systems they have installed at Duke," he said.