A snapshop from a UCI student's webmail (2011)

While we applauded UCIs Office of Information Technology (OIT) for recently increasing storage limits to now 1 GB per user and increasing attachment size limits along the way, they seem to have forgotten entirely about the aesthetic appeal of the service they are offering… just take a moment and open your webmail.

It looks worse than the webmail you could have opened up on Yahoo Mail a shocking 14 YEARS earlier, in the mere infancy of the web. How is it that this university can continue to overlook something so critical to a student’s experience – their webmail service. We know for a fact that UCI OIT can design something sharp, look no further than Zot Portal for inspiration.

While no Gmail, Zot Portal offers a slick ‘Web 2.0’ interface that makes it a pleasure to experience and use, even though Zot Portal has failed to catch on as a jack-of-all-trades first stop site for UCI students.

OIT does however offer a Google Apps feature allowing students to access UCI Email via Gmail.

So while this may seem like a minor detail to the techs at OIT who feel that faster servers, Sun’s ZFS file system databases, and 25MB file attachments are mission #1 – just remember that 95% of webmail users don’t really care about any of that. We will still use Gmail/Yahoo for all of our personal and pirated big files, all we want in UCI Webmail is at least a nice interface to view our increasingly large Zot Bills and the Anteater Weekly’s.