Recently, the Office of Information Technologies replaced the SusanD-mail digester. The digester provided a means for students to send e-mail to the entire Pomona community; messages sent to Susan Deitz at the Office of Student Affairs were reviewed and sent to students on a twice-daily basis.

The digester was not without its problems, however. The e-mails contained large chunks of unreadable text, such as HTML formatting codes.

"The indecipherable text was caused by people sending in HTML formatted messages and the digesting system simply receiving them and adding them to the out-bound message as received, HTML encoding and all," explained former Director of Information Technologies Terris Wolff.

Because the HTML occurs inside of a text-based digester message, mail clients don't recognize it as HTML. In addition, the large messages sent out by the digester were filling up users' mail quotas. As a result, with the introduction of the new e-mail system at the end of last year, it was decided to take advantage of a new capability called "public folders" and to retire the digester.

Public folders allow messages to be delivered to the community at large, instead of to just one person. To users, they appear as a second, read-only inbox. They have the advantage of not counting against the disk quota of the receiving party.

In addition, it is possible to create sub-folders to categorize the messages.

Wolf explained, "You can currently see 'Current Discussion Item', 'Lost and Found' and 'E-Chirps!' as folders. The number and title of the folders is only limited by student desires." Students also receive a daily "digest of the digester" that lists the subject lines of all new messages.

However, the new public folder system has met with widespread student and administrative discontent. To use the public folders, users must read their e-mail either via the WebMail system or via an IMAP-capable mail client; the POP3 protocol used by many clients, including web-based services such as Hotmail, is not supported. "I would encourage these people to move to IMAP," Wolff said.

Because most students don't know how to reconfigure their own computers to use IMAP, they have had to jump back and forth between WebMail and their local e-mail reader.

"I do not think public folders work well at all," Dean of Students Ann Quinley commented. "Students are not happy and everyone feels they do not know what is going on."

For its part, OIT asserts that "in the long run, the move to public folders will be of great value to the community." To address student concerns, OIT hopes to provide a more advanced version of the digester that will include HTML hyperlinks to the messages in the public folders.

However, such a change will not help students who do not use IMAP or WebMail, nor will it help students who use mail clients that cannot read HTML-formatted e-mail. "We are looking for something that actually works. Certainly we could go back to the digester," said Quinley.