E-mail failure, solutions
Last Tuesday around 2:30 p.m., about half of students and several faculty members lost their RiceMail e-mail accounts (see story, page 1). To adopt corporate-speak, e-mail is a mission-critical system. It is a main mode of communication, and when those lines collapsed, classes were postponed, schedules disrupted and students thrown into disarray.
Functioning e-mail is necessary for a university campus. Students should be able to expect that their university will provide a functioning e-mail service. It cannot fail. But it did.
While it does not make the situation better, it is reassuring to know that there was redundancy across the board — failures just happened to occur on all levels simultaneously. And we are glad to know that Information Technology quickly implemented its contingency plans, which it had drawn up for such disasters.
While the responsibility should not fall on them, we encourage students to create their own levels of redundancy. First, always keep old e-mails you would like to save in a folder on your hard drive. Second, use Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or another reliable e-mail service as your primary e-mail account and just forward everything from your Rice account. This way, even if RiceMail fails, you can still send and receive e-mails, and access old e-mails.
After all, even the best-laid plans of mice and keyboards oft go wrong and leave us naught but grief and pain for promised e-mails.
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- Men's tennis concludes fall schedule in Austin
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- Sports notebook
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- Volleyball takes on top team in C-USA tonight
- Women's cross heads to C-USA title meet as favorites
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