In recent letters to the editor, Mr. Whaley and Mr. Thune raised a number of interesting points that lack accuracy and would best be addressed by an official response from the Computation Center.

This is not that. It is my informed opinion as co-creator of Project Vincent.

While I share Mr. Thune’s preference for the original Project Vincent e-mail client, “mh,” it is a fact that many people prefer to use a PC-based e-mail client, and we are not about to ignore these people.

Of the PC-e-mail clients available at the time, Eudora Pro worked best with the existing e-mail infrastructure.

Just as we recognize that many prefer to use a PC-based e-mail client, we also recognize that many would prefer something other than Eudora Pro (perhaps simply because they are more familiar with something else).

To this end, we have been working on integrating other e-mail clients with our e-mail infrastructure. Soon you should have a much greater selection from which to choose.

As Mr. Whaley suggests we have increased the amount of resources available. Unlike an ISP where increasing customer base provides additional funds, we must depend on the providence and generosity of the University.

As it happens, the current e-mail servers are about 100 times more powerful than what we started with in 1990.

As with many things, the ’90/10 rule’ holds here. About 10 percent of the users use 90 percent of the resources. If we can’t “throw money at the problem,” then circumscribing that 10 percent makes more sense than letting the other 90 percent suffer.

There are a number of ways this might be accomplished. Asking users to voluntarily limit Eudora’s automatic check to every 10 minutes or greater is a fairly innocuous way.

Enforcing a quota would be another, more intrusive, way.

Yet another way might be some form of charging (e.g., for large amounts of e-mail left on the server). In this particular case, I believe the best solution is to work smarter.

Native (Unix-based) Project Vincent users have always had a messaging tool, Zephyr, which announced the arrival of new e-mail thus obviating the need for constant mailbox-checking.

I believe the arrival of this tool on PCs will improve both server response and the user experience.

John Hascall

Systems Software Engineer

ISU Computation Center