In response to Mr. Ahl’s brilliant computing solution:
While simplification of complex issues into snide, black and white comments is nice, using consumer-grade electronics in servers accessed by thousands of people at once is impossible and would crash in seconds. E-mail accounts are not a storage solution, they are a means of transferring information. While not instantaneous, the Wesleyan e-mail system is actually quite fast for its intended purpose, transmitting text messages and occasional attachments to over 40,000 subscribers, including faculty, staff, and alumni. For this purpose, ITS has four Sun Microsystems servers with triple-redundancy RAID arrays which scan for spam, viruses and support three different types of e-mail retrieval. These are all extremely expensive pieces of hardware. Yes, there is more to Wesleyan than current undergraduates, a fact often overlooked. As for the $30 hard drive from Best Buy, perhaps you should consider buying it for yourself and storing your data locally instead of slowing down everyone else’s e-mail by using it as your personal storage space. However, if you’d like your data to be regularly backed up such that even deleted e-mail can be retrieved weeks later, protected by layer upon layer of physical and network security, administered by professionals, served simultaneously to you and hundreds of others by enterprise-grade hardware, and accessible from anywhere, for life, stop whining.
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