GW is exploring options to increase the University-provided e-mail quota size as many students are abandoning Colonial Mail in favor of other free online e-mail services that offer larger amounts of memory storage.

The University’s e-mail system allows 20 megabytes of storage for students and 50 megabytes for faculty and staff, whereas free online accounts such as Google Mail offer up to 2.5 gigabytes.

Alexa Kim, executive director of Technology Services for Information Systems and Services, said the University is looking to increase the student quota to 50 megabytes, but is unsure when the change could happen.

“Customers’ expectations are being formatted through the commercial offerings available to them,” Kim said.

“E-mail, as a service, is for e-mail and not for storage,” Kim said.

Faculty and staff can increase their 50-megabyte quota to 100 megabytes for free and then can increase their quota for $10 per 10-megabyte increase.

Kim said a reason for delaying the increase in quota size for students is the upcoming University budget cuts. She said she is unsure if money will be available to perform the change.

If a CMail user exceeds his quota, the service automatically disables messages from being sent or received from the e-mail address.

Kim said ISS encourages students to access CMail through programs such as Microsoft Outlook, which allows users to save files to their personal computer and delete them from the server.

Georgetown University also provides a 20-megabyte storage quota, according to a university Web site. Following pressure from students about low e-mail quotas, administrators at the University of Pennsylvania announced plans to hire an e-mail service provider to replace its current School of Arts and Sciences e-mail system, according to the school’s student newspaper.

Last month, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported that the university would be deciding between e-mail services offered by Yahoo, GMail and MSN’s Hotmail, which allows 250 megabytes of storage to users for free. Pennsylvania’s e-mail accounts currently provide students with 65 megabytes of storage.

Some students have already dropped CMail in favor of other free, higher-storage e-mail services.

“Google believes people should be able to store and search for messages instead of deleting or losing them,” Google representative Courtney Hohne wrote in an e-mail.

“It’s great being able to manage all of my e-mail from one place,” said freshman Lev Trubkovich, a Google Mail user.

Trubkovich said one helpful feature through GMail is the system’s forwarding function, which allows users to send and receive messages from various e-mail domains through the GMail server. Trubkovich said he views his messages in GMail, but is able to respond to messages with his CMail address, a feature some other servers also provide.