Jordan Gerard/Winonan

Every 30 seconds there are 140 actions connecting to the Winona State University network servers, so trying to isolate only one account to fix the problem with students’ email accounts is like finding a needle in a haystack, Marc Hauge, systems administrator, said.

Just last week on Jan. 20, Technical Support Center received numerous reports of students’ email accounts on Android devices, iPads, iPhones and Microsoft Mail applications not working, Hauge said. Access to email using web browsers was not affected.

The problem is “intermittent email connectivity issues,” said the email from Technical Support Center sent on Jan. 24. This meant that the connection failure is between Winona State and Microsoft servers.

“We’re trying to track down the gremlin that is causing the issues,” Hauge said. He has been working on the case since the beginning of last week.

Students are being prompted for their password every time they go into the Mail app. on their devices. The Mail app. should remember the password, but since there is an interruption in connectivity issues, it asks for their password every time, Hauge said.

For some students, the issue has intruded into daily life. Junior Olivia Stoltman said she had email issues from the start of this semester.

She said her email would take nearly 20 minutes to load and then would give her an error message.
“It was very frustrating since I had group projects to work on and had to contact my other group members by email,” Stoltman said.

The email app. is on Microsoft’s server, but students’ accounts are housed on Winona State servers. Normally, the connection is supposed to redirect back to Winona State, who can see it is from Microsoft, so Winona State servers can authenticate the username and password and allow access into email.

Now, with the current issues, the Microsoft server is saying that the service isn’t available, which means that the connection is dropped between Microsoft and Winona State servers, Hauge said.

The ideal solution would be to reproduce the issue and isolate individual email accounts to test each one to see if the problem was contained in one of them, Hauge said.

But since students and faculty constantly use email every day, that solution is next to impossible.
“We can’t just stop students from getting their email to isolate the one email that is having issues,” Hauge said.

Once they isolate the problem, they can fix it, Hauge said. The problem could be “very simple or very complicated.”

Issues like this have never occurred before, because this year is the first time that students’ email accounts have been hosted under an outside service like Microsoft Office 365.

Junior Jayde Schoh said she had been having problems for the last week with email as well.

“I am rarely on my computer, so not having email on my phone was very irritating, especially with class cancellations for bad weather,” Schoh said.

Technical Support Center continues to work out these issues.