UA WebMail services experienced email delays again Tuesday at 10 a.m. due to an unknown problem, officials from University Information Technology Services said.

The delays come a day after what one official called the longest outage – close to 10 hours – in WebMail’s six years of use.

The problem was primarily due to the large number of current WebMail users, which is far more than the system was originally designed to accommodate, Associate Director of UITS-Frontline Services Thomas Rees said.

“”The demand on the system has completely outgrown its ability to handle it,”” Rees said. “”The software was never meant to handle 60,000 accounts.””

Administrative Assistant in Student Affairs Diane Jensen said her department reverted to making phone calls once email services went down, causing delays in the office’s affairs.

“”It slows a lot of stuff down,”” she said.

UITS officials said they spent hours Tuesday looking for the cause of the problem.

“”We are systematically going through and turning off different processes. We have a whole incident team working to figure out this problem,”” said UITS Senior Director Limell Lawson.

UITS technicians suspended the UA’s new email service CatMail Tuesday to make sure the new service was not the problem.

Despite the suspension, 7,474 students had opted into CatMail and 226 WebMail accounts were successfully transferred to the new service by 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, Lawson said.

The outage highlights the need for a transition to a new email system, Rees said.

“”The old system barely gets by on a regular basis,”” he said.

TIMELINE:

• 11:30 a.m. Monday: UITS officials start to notice delays.

• 9:20 p.m. Monday: all delayed emails sent out.

• 10 a.m. Tuesday: delays noticed again.

• Tuesday afternoon: delays fixed.