Harvard E-Mail Debuts on Web

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Computer Services launched yesterday its new Webmail service, which allows students, faculty and staff to check e-mail through any normal web browser.

The new service supplements telnet and other e-mail programs such as Eudora and Outlook, but doesn’t replace them. Coordinator of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98, a former Crimson editor, said Webmail is just another—though more convenient—option for checking e-mail.

“In this day and age it’s easier to find a computer with a web brower than one with a secure telnet client,” Davis said.

Webmail works very similarly to other web-based e-mail services, such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, allowing e-mail to be accessed from nearly any computer. Users need only visit the website webmail.fas.harvard.edu, logging in as they would for telnet.

Services like this have been available at other colleges, such as the University of Pennsylvania, for several years. Davis attributed the delay, in part, to searching for a webmail application that would work well with Harvard’s current e-mail system.

“We spent a lot of time working on this and getting it ready,” Davis said.

The new Webmail service is integrated into FAS’ current e-mail system. This means users are still able to access new mail, sent mail and mail archives through both the existing system—telnet and e-mail programs like Eudora and Outlook—and the new Webmail system. In contrast, users who access e-mail through both telnet and a program like Eudora often find messages checked through one inaccessible through the other.

FAS’ Webmail service can also handle foreign languages and downloads more easily than telnet, Davis said. But this new service may be slightly slower than telnet or other e-mail programs due to different methods of sending and receiving data.

To protect user logins and passwords, as well as the e-mail messages themselves, the Webmail service uses 128-bit Secure Socket Layer encryption, which is the industry standard that is used in highly secure Internet applications.

This new e-mail service comes on the heels of a new policy to allow only secure connections via telnet and FTP, starting April 17, though the release of Webmail is unrelated to that decision, Davis said.

Webmail is still in its first release version and will continue to be improved, according to FAS Computer Services. Users can give feedback about the new system at webmail@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Jonathan P. Ungar can be reached at ungar@fas.harvard.edu.