The Brown & White

Among the first letters that students accepted to Lehigh receive is the one saying how to access their e-mail.

While once the key to the formerly student-exclusive Facebook, a college e-mail account still acts as the lifeline between students, professors and administrators.

But for some students, the ever-crashing quickly filling e-mail accounts through Campus Portal and IMP just don't cut it.

Through external applications and third-party software, students can deck out their inboxes to an electronic equivalent of "ePimp my Ride."

Popular among students is forwarding e-mail to a third party service, such as a Gmail or Yahoo. By forwarding mail to these accounts, they can take advantage of massive amounts of storage. For example, Gmail is now up to 7.1 gigabytes. That's more than 720 times more storage than Lehigh.

Dan Rogers, '09, uses the Lehigh site. He said that while he doesn't like to use it, as a student he doesn't have the time and is too lazy to open another account.

"The quota is so annoying, and since the update last year, some of my links are no longer working," Rogers said.

Courtney Ronan, '09, switched to Hotmail mid-way through her junior year at Lehigh when her Lehigh account stopped working. Her account was over quota, but she did not receive the notification until it was too late.

"Apparently, my inbox was full and never warned me of anything, and then it just stopped giving me mail," Ronan said.

Problems such as overfull mailboxes or disappearing mailboxes irk some students, but according to the LTS Web site, these problems are easily solved.

When inboxes are beyond their quota, students need to delete the biggest and oldest e-mails they no longer need. Once inboxes have been cleaned up, backed up e-mail will appear.

Overfilling inboxes can be avoided altogether by setting up filters to screen out spam or by asking for a temporary inbox capacity increase.

LTS offers a Help Desk and guides on their Web site, lehigh.edu/helpdesk.

Ronan said areas for improvement in the IMP and Portal mail systems include better and timelier notification of mail quota, better attachment sizes and other perks like font sizes and colors.

Also popular is third-party software, such as Outlook, which is available with Microsoft Works, or Thunderbird, which is free. Both download the e-mail directly to a student's computer, where it can then be used offline. Setup, however, is more complicated.

From a usability level, third-party e-mail clients offer many additional features and perks that Lehigh's e-mail system does not. Thunderbird provides an address book that syncs to Lehigh's address book so addresses do not have to be saved or looked up. It also provides almost instant notification when mail is received.

Other third-party clients also have features that automatically filter out junk e-mail, allow for large attachment and mailbox sizes and have fun features such as font color and chat.

Not all students are upset with Lehigh's e-mail system. Jeremy Olen, '09, said he is still comfortable using Portal as his primary e-mail client.

"I've just always gone through portal," Olen said. "It's what I'm familiar with. I'll be honest; I don't really know what IMP is."

Whether students decide to use Lehigh Portal, IMP, an entirely different system or a combination of e-mail providers is a personal choice.

At the very least, many options exist; it is up to the users to determine which is most convenient for them.