For years, the university's e-mail system has been something of a joke among the student population.

Criticisms run the gamut from "It's slow," to "It's antiquated" and all the way to "It sucks."

After all, MSU Webmail lacks rudimentary abilities and basic e-mail functions.

Now, finally, something might be done to help The Little E-mail System That Could.

ASMSU, MSU's undergraduate student government, has proposed a bill to "urge the appropriate administrators" to update the system.

Much like "The Six Million Dollar Man," the Student Assembly bill states that we have the technology. We can make our e-mail bigger, stronger and faster than ever before.

And it also calls to bring our system more up-to-date with such features as italics, bolding, underlining and automatic spell check.

Couple that with HTML support and more space than our paltry 128 megabytes, and MSU could finally have the modern e-mail system it needs.

At the moment, MSU Webmail is the Ford Edsel of e-mail. It's slow, ponderous, unreliable and appears to be overwhelmingly disliked. During peak e-mail access hours, it seems to be harder to access e-mail when many people are using it at the same time.

E-mails received late. E-mails not received. Students unable to send papers and projects to themselves or to professors for classes. The list goes on.

Many students, in order to counteract our unreliable system, have turned to Gmail, Google Inc.'s free e-mail service. Gmail offers users 2,836 megabytes of storage space, multiple fonts, colors, highlighting, italics, paragraph formatting and even a chat feature that works somewhat similarly to AOL's Instant Messenger.

Now, MSU Webmail doesn't need a lot of the extraneous features that Gmail comes loaded with, nor does it need the gargantuan storage space. It doesn't even need fancy colors and fonts.

But basic tools like an automatic spell check, bolding, italics, underlining and a modest boost in storage space? These are not unreasonable requests.

And most importantly, our e-mail system needs to be reliable. There should be very sparse server failures, and e-mails should never go astray.

We're a Big Ten school, and through programs like ANGEL, we appear to be trying to embrace technology as an aid to education. Nowadays, it is perfectly normal for professors to request PowerPoint presentations and other high-tech programs for projects to be sent as e-mail attachments.

So why not update our e-mail system to reflect that? Students should not feel forced to abandon our integrated mail system for something like Gmail. Our e-mail should be great — or at least adequate.

Good luck, Student Assembly Chairperson Roger Ludy. As per the bill, he will speak to the administration about changing the system. Here's to hoping he can help bring our e-mail system out of the dark ages.