Administrators plan to revamp the university’s e-mail system and add more storage space to individual accounts after a hardware crash last week interrupted service to users for more than 24 hours.

The system failure began Wednesday, when the hard disk that stores GUMail and manages users’ inboxes stopped functioning properly. Mail delivery did not resume until late Thursday afternoon.

Beth Ann Bergsmark, a director at University Information Services, said that a rare hardware failure, coupled with a large influx of spam into the system, crashed the service.

“It has been about two years since we’ve seen a hardware issue similar to this one,” she said.

Bergsmark said that UIS is working on a “digital locker,” an online space for storing received e-mails that would help improve GUMail’s storage quota. Other changes could include improved spam protection and better interaction with other e-mail systems, Bergsmark said.

Improving or replacing the GUMail system, which was last overhauled in 2004, could cost anywhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars, Bergsmark said. She added that the final plans for the new system would not be made until December.

“It’s not cheap,” Bergsmark said.

Alexandra Lee (SFS ’10) said that she sometimes experiences delays of up to two hours when forwarding e-mail from her university account to Hotmail, her preferred e-mail provider.

Bergsmark said in a broadcast e-mail sent Friday that delays are caused by constantly-changing spam-blocking definitions that are used by other e-mail providers.

“One day we may hand off mail to Hotmail.com in seconds, and another day we may see a four-hour delay,” Bergsmark said in the e-mail.

George Foulard (COL ’09) said that he hopes that a new e-mail system will allow students to hold more than the current 20 megabytes of storage currently offered by GUMail.

“Twenty MB of storage was acceptable in the ’90s,” Foulard said. “Today, e-mail content is so much bigger than in the past that to expect 20 MB to be sufficient is absurd.”

Patrick Warfield, a visiting assistant professor of musicology, said that he is often prevented from sending e-mails to his students because their accounts are full.

“I frequently get bounced messages back from student accounts,” he said.