Mike Crupi/THE POST Athens resident Terry Boyer works at one of the rapid check e-mail terminals in the Baker Center 1954 Lounge. Boyer said he has frequently encountered delays at such terminals due mostly to the fact that they won't connect correctly to OAK.

Although an Oak upgrade caused Ohio University students problems with their e-mail accounts this week, Computer Support Services says the long-run improvements will be worth the wait.

Computer Support Services has been at work since July to upgrade Oak and improve e-mail service, but despite intentions to improve software, glitches in the program are causing problems in student e-mail accounts, from missing mailboxes to invisible messages.

A disk problem caused a file corruption in accounts ending with the numbers 84, 88, 92 and 96, and some students could not access their accounts between Wednesday and Thursday morning. Computer Support Services was able to restore information up to Aug. 30 with tape backups, but information after that date was lost.

Duane Starkey, manager of Computer Support Services, said Computer Support Services sent out readings of the computer activity for testing so the same problem can be avoided in the future.

Still, the 30,000 users combined with the volume of new activations are slowing the system.

"Any time you're dealing with the quantity of messages and people using so many different names, there are going to be glitches," he said. "Once we are made aware, we go and fix it right away."

Eric Humphrey, senior technical support analyst for Computer Support Services, said one of the common problems has been numbered messages with no text.

"Some people's inboxes got corrupted and may start seeing numbers," he said.

Once the account's inbox is corrupted, all incoming messages appear blank.

While Humphrey expects the major problems to be solved by the third week of the quarter, he said he hopes students will remain patient.

"People have to understand that there are so many people activating their accounts and installing new features," he said. "When we get through the first couple of weeks, everything will be smoother."

Many students have seen a variety of e-mail problems, including senior journalism major Melanie Tagg.

"I had no sent mail box," she said. "It was no problem, it was just weird."

The upgrades have caused more extensive problems for others.

"It dumped all of my old messages into my inbox," said Katie Dunn, a senior INCO major. "I had 150 messages in my inbox. It took me two days to sort out."

Humphrey encourages students who have problems with their account to contact Computer Support Services.

"If people are having problems, they need to contact us," he said, "Big problems must be dealt with here (at the office)."

When completed, the e-mail system will allow increased e-mail quotas and students will be able to share folders and store e-mail messages in their personal computers.

"We wanted to make sure we were providing the level of performance everyone needed," Starkey said.

The IMAP-4 program was designed by a university staff member and did not cost OU extra money. Because of the amount of people using the system, Starkey said the system needed software upgrades.

"We had seen exponential growth in people using e-mail," he said. "The Oak server had really been expanded all we wanted."

The upgrades, which began July 17, went on behind the scenes so Oak could keep running while the changes were made.

'The computer programs were written to do it while Oak was still up for a maximum amount of time," Starkey said.

Users whose accounts had been updated received an e-mail notification of the changes.

The upgrades now features a double log-in, where the first log-in allows a student to access to the Pine system, and the second connects to the Oak mailboxes. Starkey said the future improvements will allow students to access Oak without going through Pine.

The upgrades, which were delayed during the beginning of the school year, will start again next week. A finishing date has not been set.

"It's variable, it's strictly based on the message numbers," Starkey said. "We don't know how many there are."