Andrea Campain said she wishes MSU Webmail was operating as usual.
Right now, Campain said she has several different group projects in the works, all of which use an MSU e-mail account as a main communication form.
"It's been really hard to keep up with everything going on in the group project because we can't communicate," the advertising senior said.
For the last 10 days, Campain and anyone else who uses Webmail have found themselves waiting longer than normal for the server to load.
Due to an upgrade in software this summer, the new e-mail system in use is not working properly at the correct speed, said Rich Wiggins, senior information technologist for Academic Computing & Network Services, adding that network users have called trying to figure out the problem.
The system was upgraded in order to increase capacity, but the new server couldn't keep up with the increased amount of traffic during the fall semester.
"We anticipated we needed more space to hold the amount of e-mail people are sending and receiving," Wiggins said.
He said during mid-mornings and mid-to-late afternoons, he and his team have noticed that Webmail slows down significantly.
To fix the problem, the office has been conducting conference calls with the software vendor. The calls give the team ideas of what they can do to try and bring the system back to its normal speed, Wiggins said. He added that he hopes to have the problem solved in the next day.
Interdisciplinary humanities senior Allen Grabo uses alternative sources for e-mail and said the Webmail malfunctions have not been a problem for him.
"I also have Gmail, so it hasn't been a big deal for me," he said.
The computing office regularly upgrades different programs on the university's network.
"We keep track of a community about 50,000 or more," Wiggins said. "Every summer, we do various upgrades. The server upgrade was in anticipation of more and more classes using (the ANGEL Learning Management System)."
Wiggins said about 2 million messages are processed each day by the Webmail system. He said with virus and spam blocking, in addition to handling messages, the system has a lot of work to do.
On Monday, the computing office posted a message saying, "Mail.msu.edu is currently experiencing performance problems during times of peak use." The message has a link connecting users to a help site that offers further details about the problems.
"The team is going full-tilt, monitoring the situation," Wiggins said. "They are trying one thing, seeing if it fixes it, then trying another."
Staff writer Debbie Labedz contributed to this report.
