ASMSU members are hoping to give students additional e-mail and file storage space on the university's hard drive and to allow graduates access to their e-mail accounts indefinitely.
MSU students are given a university e-mail account of 64 megabytes for academic purposes and personal use. The university additionally grants students 52 megabytes of file storage space on its Andrew File System, or AFS - a campuswide filing system.
Student Assembly Human Ecology Representative Jared Rapp is requesting that both quotas be doubled and that graduates be able to pay a monthly stipend to have their e-mail accounts open until they choose to close them.
There is a need for an increase in e-mail space because students are saving e-mails they receive from several organizations, which causes their space to fill fast, he said.
"I'm on lots of committees and involved with different (Registered Student Organizations)," he said. "I could receive 10 or 15 megabytes of e-mail in one document."
Once students' e-mails are full, their mail settings automatically stop them from receiving additional e-mails, said Rich Wiggins, senior information technologist for Academic Computing & Network Services.
He said the only way to prevent e-mail accounts from reaching full capacity is by deleting e-mails or by using other means to store information, such as a disk.
Rapp said students should have the option to request additional AFS space to store documents. Currently only faculty, teaching assistants and other staff have the ability to request additional space.
Wiggins said increasing the AFS and e-mail space has been discussed, but he needs more information about the request from the Student Assembly.
"It's technically feasible, but if you double the quota for people, usage will rise," Wiggins said, adding students who fill the additional space would eventually request even more space.
But Rapp said not everyone would use their total amount of space.
"There are two kinds of people on campus - the heavy users and the non-heavy users," he said. "The non-heavy users will most likely forward documents to an AOL account or something."
Rapp said Student Assembly Chairperson Andrew Schepers will draft a letter to present to Academic Computing & Network Services personnel.
Wiggins, however, said even though students can use their university e-mail account two years after their graduation date, the university isn't looking to offer graduates e-mail accounts beyond that.
Dan Apczynski, a 2002 graduate, said the university should extend e-mail accounts for graduates because the transition to a new account could cause headaches for graduates.
"Tuition is so expensive that they sort of owe it to us to keep our e-mails open," he said.
Apczynski said having the university e-mail account is beneficial when lots of employers already have it, but he couldn't see himself using it 10 years from now.
"There will come a time where you'll close it," he said.
