However, lately there has been a general increase in the use of e-mail, according to Steen--and the pattern of student use can be especially burdensome.

The HASCS staff has been getting a lot of complaints, according to Eddie Huang '03, a user assistant at the Science Center help desk.

But the reasons for the server's sluggishness relate back to students.

Steen cited four reasons for the slowdown.

First, in the last year, not only has the volume of e-mail increased by 30 percent, but the average memory size of e-mail has doubled as people send more graphics, documents and music files over the Internet.

Another reason for the slowdown is large e-mail inboxes. Every time a person logs into the Pine mail program, his or her inbox is accessed. Bigger inboxes take longer to open and thus put more stress on the server.

When students leave their telnet windows open even when they are not using e-mail, the program automatically refreshes every five minutes. Leaving the window open is thus the same as checking e-mail every five minutes, which burdens the server.

Finally, those people who use programs like Eudora or Outlook often leave their mail on the server even after reading it. They often have inboxes with thousands of messages, again slowing access.