Last semester, ASMSU passed a bill to fight for a revamping of the MSU e-mail system. Nothing was accomplished then, but the new group of student government officials is going to find out what it would take to update the system.

“The main underlying issue in my mind is just keeping up with today’s standard of technology,” Student Assembly chairperson Michael Leahy said. “Our e-mail system works, we have just been lagging behind, and as time goes on, we are getting further and further behind.”

ASMSU is MSU’s undergraduate student government.

At Sept. 27’s Student Assembly meeting, the officials and representatives voted to table a bill until the Oct. 11 meeting that would investigate the possibilities of updating MSU’s e-mail service. Those updates include: stronger spam filters, text options (bold, italics, underlining and more), an improved spell check, the ability to support HTML in e-mails, additional storage space, a functional search feature and enhanced user-design capabilities.

Dave Gift, vice provost for the MSU Libraries, Computing and Technology, is involved with MSU’s e-mail system and its updates. He said in the past, ASMSU has not consulted him ahead of time, which would have made it easier to discuss the cost aspect of updating the Web site.

This semester, the assembly contacted Gift before passing a bill.

Spring 2008 is the next time the MSU Libraries, Computing and Technology department will look into updates, Gift said.

“We appreciate student input, but we want to visit with them and talk about trade-offs involved,” he said. “Most students aren’t tuned in with choices and costs. Most of these things are more complex than they seem.”

Gift said to move to a completely new system, such as a Microsoft Exchange Server, or Google Mail, it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Zoology sophomore Amelia Gessner said she checks her e-mail often and she is not happy with the amount of spam that seeps into her inbox, even with MSU webmail’s spam blocker.

“I am still getting e-mails from people that say, ‘I am so-and-so from this country and I want you to do this billion dollar money transfer,’ Gessner said. “I don’t even know if that’s real, but as far as I’m concerned – it’s spam.”

On the other hand, communication doctoral student Erin Maloney said MSU’s e-mail system is pretty good.

“Students here get far more space than students at previous schools I’ve been to,” Maloney said. “If there was one thing that I really miss about previous schools’ e-mail systems, though, it would have to be a search bar.”

Until any type of drastic change is made, Gift said the e-mail system is constantly being tweaked with tiny technical updates and faster response times.