E-mail Innovations To Premier in April

Checking your campus e-mail at home is about to get a lot easier, as two major improvements in the Harvard e-mail system are slated to launch April 17.

Encrypted telnet and a web-based e-mail portal are both part of an effort by Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS) to increase security and system speed while enhancing off-campus e-mail accessbility.

Web-based e-mail will also be operational this spring—ideally on April 17 according to HASCS.

“It’s a very nice interface,” said Kevin S. Davis ’98, HASCS director of residential computing.

The program will feature a black background and the same hierarchy of menus and folders as the traditional Pine.

Davis likened the program to a hybrid of Pine and existing web-based e-mail systems like Hotmail.

“Web-based e-mail is something we have been looking at for a few years,” Davis said, “but we have waited to learn from the experiences of other schools.”

In order to test and refine its new system, HASCS has enlisted the help of all of its undergraduate user assistants and full-time staff members—about 140 people.

HASCS’s goal is to have web-mail available before students and faculty leave for the summer, so that they can access e-mail from remote locations.

However, partly because of the switch to web-based e-mail, HASCS will be modifying the way that students access e-mail via telnet programs.

The two improvements are designed to prevent “malicious users,” commonly known as hackers, from stealing user names and passwords to break into Harvard’s computer network.

Davis said these users run a variety of programs on the network that use up Harvard’s bandwith and generally make the system slower for students. An “encrypted client,” he said, can help combat this problem.

“It’s important for us to keep our servers as secure as possible to protect both user information and the integrity of the system,” Davis said.

The immediate change will disable unencrypted telnet, such as the version that is accessed on PCs via the “run” option.

“If you’re using [unencrypted] telnet, after April 17 it won’t work,” Davis said.

Davis said these users must download the encrypted telnet program SecureCRT for PC computers or NiftyTelnet for Macintoshs, both of which are available at software.fas.harvard.edu.

Eudora and Microsoft Outlook users will not be affected until next fall, when they will also have to shift to an encrypted program.