The University has gone and made another big change. The once familiar University WebMail has been rearranged almost beyond recognition.

Nearly everyone on this campus checks their e-mails at least once a day, if not more. The University provides each student and faculty member with an e-mail account.

The colors being changed is most likely the first thing you noticed. The sight is no longer clad in brown and orange. It is now a more modern looking and a bit more plain with its new black and gray contrasts. This, however, is not the most significant change.

When you open an e-mail, it no longer opens in the same window as your inbox. Your e-mail will now open in a separate window.

This new feature allows you to open several emails at once while still browsing through your inbox. Depending on how you look at it and the amount of windows your computer can handle without crashing, you may see this as an advantage; as do we. The problem arises when you open attachments.

When you open your attachments, it will have to open another program to open it, such as Microsoft Word. Some students have run into an annoyance with a blank explorer window opening up along with the attachment. The annoyance could turn into frustration if your computer cannot handle the work load.

Another aspect that changed is there are no longer two tool bars that allow you to delete, undelete and empty trash. The only tool bar with these functions is located at the top of your inbox. Here is the complaint: the toolbar is not stationary. When you scroll to the bottom of your inbox, the toolbar moves up as well; being hidden from your mouse. In order to delete a message at the bottom of the inbox page, you have to click and then scroll to the top of the page to reveal the delete button. This is a minor inconvenience, but an inconvenience nonetheless.

Also, if you delete an e-mail while it is opened in its separate window, the next e-mail will automatically open in the same window. This could be confusing to the student who doesn’t realize their message is already deleted and they click delete again, thus deleting another e-mail.

The new WebMail interface is definitely a big change. As of now, there are some mixed feelings about the new WebMail interface. Students were not given much warning about the new WebMail change, which may have caused some negative feelings. Still in-time, the new WebMail will become familiar.