Heavy e-mail traffic overloaded the Central Mail Server Tuesday night, inconveniencing University students and faculty until yesterday afternoon.
James Jokl, Information Technology and Communication Office director of communications and systems, said Webmail experiences the highest volume of traffic around Thanksgiving and the end of the school year, adding that ITC was not expecting this sporadic downtime.
ITC Lab Consultant Nader Raja, who was on duty in the Brown Science and Engineering Library, heard complaints from students throughout the morning about the difficulties with the server.
"It's kind of hard to communicate without e-mail," Raja said. "Any kind of system you have you're going to have these types of problems. You're going to have to live with it."
The problem with the CMS also affected students who used e-mail programs such as Mulberry, Outlook Express and Thunderbird. Thomas Duffy, an ITC lab consultant at Alderman Library, said some students using these programs described the system as being "exceptionally slow."
In an attempt to find ways around the problem, some students attempted to forward their Webmail messages to other e-mail accounts such as Gmail, Raja said.
University spokesperson Jeff Hanna said he experienced difficulty accessing data stored on the CMS for a University public affairs publication.
"We were trying to get the story from the candlelight vigil to post on UVa Today," Hanna said, adding that he was not able to access photographs and other data for the story when he returned from Blacksburg.
Jokl said he advises students to store important data on other available spaces such as Home Directory rather than on the CMS.
ITC worked yesterday morning to alleviate stress points on the system, Jokl said.
He attributed increased e-mail traffic to the advancement of technology on Grounds in recent years.
Before the beginning of the year, ITC expanded the CMS to accommodate an expected increase in traffic, Jokl said.
"The e-mail volume continues to build, and we need to stay ahead of the curve." Jokl said. "Growth has happened faster than we anticipated."
He added that ITC continues to search for the exact cause of the server downtime and plans to take appropriate measures upon learning the cause.
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