The new site, which can be accessed at http://beta.mail.msu.edu, offers a calendar, global address book, advanced search system and new design.

“A significant difference is the graphical interface,” Ball said.

“The new system has a lot more options and personalization.”

The beta site offers three different layouts to allow students, faculty, staff and retirees to find the format that best suits them, Ball said.

Storage space for students will increase from 128 to 512 megabytes by the end of the year, and to 1 gigabyte for faculty and staff members.

The current Webmail system, mail.msu.edu, will be accessible through the rest of the year.

“We definitely wanted to allow people to have more features,” Ball said.

“We did research with faculty and students, and saw what we could do to improve on in the scope of what we’re able to do.”

There are 176,000 e-mail accounts on the MSU e-mail system.

The current system was launched in March of 2003 and has 225,000 Webmail logins per day.

The beta system’s default option has the spam filter turned on in light of recent phishing attacks by con artists who attempt to gain students’ personal information by posing as trustworthy entities.

Ball said the MSU ATS team has worked on the beta system for about a year, and hardware costs, which fall under the budget of MSU ATS, about $330,000.

Ball said a language selection option that features several different viewing languages will benefit the international students on campus.

Students said they could use the extra storage space for school and business matters.

“I like to keep some of my old e-mails so I can keep track if there was something I needed for a group project or something,” said Ben Carcone, a telecommunications, information studies and media senior.

Joel Keesler said spam protection is an important feature when he accesses e-mail.

“I use the current spam stuff, and hopefully making it the default option will make a difference,” said Keesler, a telecommunications, information studies and media senior.