Climate wasn’t the only change when students returned from Spring Break, as WebMail underwent a facelift.

According to Information Technology Services, the primary reasons for the changes were to deal with security and efficiency.

WebMail is no longer run by the same server, said David Edsall, system analyst for Academic Information Technologies.

The sign-in page now goes to the Pubcookie server, which allows users to access other services, he said.

“It’s more than just WebMail now,” said IT director Cheryl Langston.

Other services include using it for Government of Student Body elections, site-license software downloads, the lectures program and Recreation Services reservations – for example, reserving tennis courts, Edsall said.

Frank Poduska, system analyst for AIT, said he hopes the single login will apply to WebCT in the future.

“The current version of WebCT doesn’t support the same thing,” he said.

WebCT is so widely used, he said he thinks it will be another service added in the future.

Having these other services offered is why the new page is “bland and generic,” Edsall said.

The security issue the new WebMail hopes to address is when students do not properly log out, which is a common problem.

“Ever since we’ve had public labs where you don’t have to log out we’ve had the problem,” Edsall said.

Users were allowed to have the computer remember their name and password when logging in. Edsall said that was a problem because someone after the user could log into their e-mail account and send “nasty” e-mails under another person’s e-mail address.

Now, when the user exits the browser, the next user cannot get into the previous user’s e-mail account. The cookies that used to keep the name and password on the computer are now destroyed after the user exits the browser or logs out, Edsall said.

If a user doesn’t exit the browser or log out, they will remain logged in for eight hours, instead of the old ticket lifetime of one hour.

“Because ticket lifetime is longer, people need to be better about closing browsers when done,” Edsall said.

The ticket lifetime was increased because signing in now offers access to other services.

“If this is going to be a single sign in, if your ticket runs out, you aren’t going to want to log in again,” Edsall said.

The longer tickets were also set up because users logged in multiple times over several hours.

“Response has been generally receptive,” Langston said.

The feedback has led them to make a few more changes, including giving students the option to skip the intermediate page when logging in, and briefly leaving the log-out page up before going on to the IT Web site.

Edsall said the intermediate page was left at first because the Solution Center often uses it when helping students. Giving the option to skip the page will make it more difficult to help students.

“That does mean it makes it harder to help people in the future,” Poduska said.

The Solutions Center will still be able to help users by finding a way around this new option, Poduska said.

The IT page was chosen as the end Web site so users can access other services, such as WebCT and AccessPlus.

“As more services start using these log ins, we have to figure out where they go after they log out,” Poduska said.

Edsall said IT may someday implement a portal users will be taken to after they log out. The portal would give users access to many Web sites, and could include information only relevant to them.

For the server, however, it’s all in a day’s work. Edsall said WebMail has more than 100,000 logins a day from 20,000 different users.