[672] in I/T Delivery
WebMail Delivery Status - December 2001
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jagruti S. Patel)
Wed Jan 9 22:57:44 2002
Message-Id: <5.0.2.1.2.20020109222640.042d3aa0@hesiod>
Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2002 22:46:50 -0500
To: delivery@mit.edu
From: "Jagruti S. Patel" <jag@MIT.EDU>
Cc: webmail@mit.edu, jis@mit.edu
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Project Name: WebMail - Implementation of IMP
Project Leader: Jag Patel
Report Date: January 7, 2002
URL: http://web.mit.edu/is/delivery/webmail
Try it out at http://web.mit.edu/webmail/
This Month's accomplishments Plans (December 2001)
- Held information and training session for HelpDesk Staff, BLT and TPS
- Continued working to add functionality options, implementing minor fixes
- Continued communications, emphasizing public pilot for anyone to try
- Provided support during December using casetracker; less than 50 questions
- Almost 3000 unique users in December, data and tidbits at
http://web.mit.edu/webmail/doc/data.html
- Continued monitoring feedback and issues; drafted "punchlist" for January
and February
Next Month's Plans (January 2002)
- Update Horde/IMP code base to more current but stable version
- Continue minor bug fixes and usability updates
- Attempt to reproduce mildly troublesome platforms / browsers, such as XP,
Mac OSX, Mozilla, etc
- Try webmail with PDAs as possible - Windows CE, Palm and PocketPC were
used in December
- Hold IAP quickstart / seminar
- Work on stock answers and suggest potential areas of change in the IS
email pages
- Report on various measures to help understand how people are using
webmail / email; draft starts at
http://web.mit.edu/webmail/doc/data.html
Issues / Observations
- We had a lot of compliments for WebMail during December -- it seems to be
popular at airports, cybercafes, and "on vacation at my parents' house"
- Users occasionally do not understand what WebMail is and what it cannot do.
Example: Recent versions of IE and Netscape offer to remember
passwords. If you log in via IE, and you have it set up to remember your
passwords, IE will remember your kerberos username and password. When you
go back to WebMail, the application will ask for the password as usual, but
IE will jump into action and give WebMail your password without any
prompting or action from you. WebMail can't prevent IE from remembering
something the user typed into the browser. In any case - we made a page
for this (http://web.mit.edu/webmail/doc/ie.html), and will make sure it's
part of the stock answers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jag Patel
MIT Information Systems
jag@mit.edu
617.253.8167
