Brandon Martin during his
summer at Cornell University

Erskine Physics Major Builds A Better Mail Server

It used to be that young inventors wanted to build a better mouse trap. Today, they want to build a better email server.

And that's what Erskine College senior physics major and E.B. Kennedy Scholar Brandon Martin has spent a lot of his spare time over the last several months working on, a mail server that enables Erskine students, faculty and staff to check their email from remote locations.

Simpler and more user friendly than previous methods, Martin's server started small.

"It was just a little piece of code I noticed and figured I could put the rest around it," Martin said.

Martin's motivation was a desire to help fellow students "I saw that a lot of people were not comfortable using Unix to get their email from remote locations – if you were off campus at a friend's computer, that's what you had to use."

But the difficulty some students encountered in using Unix was not even the chief problem Martin set out to solve. "The main draw for students in using this new server is being able to open attachments from wherever they are. For security reasons, we had the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) turned off, so they could not do this with Unix."

Martin credits physics professor and Associate Dean for Learning and Technology Dr. Bill Junkin with getting him interested in PERL (Popular Extraction and Reporting Language), and that's how the invention process began.

"I acquired a book on PERL, and one of the appendices was on checking your mail," Martin said. "So after working with Dr. Junkin for a long time I figured out how to incorporate PERL into web pages."

A few students have served as experimental users of a beta version of Martin's server, but now the real thing is available to Erskine students, faculty and staff. "You can go to webmail.erskine.edu and that's where the the log-in begins for checking your mail when you are off campus," Martin said. The mail server can also be used from on-campus locations, Martin added.

Erskine 's Director of Academic Computing and Technology Bobby Clarke has provided advice during the invention process with Martin, but says the Goldwater Scholar, who spent a summer doing research at Cornell University in 2000, "did it himself."

"I gave him some general guiding advice but I can't take credit for any of it," said Clarke. "It is unusual for a student to have achieved the skill level that he has."

Martin spent this summer working for AmerSteel in Charlotte, N.C., as an IT (Information Technology) intern. He plans to enter the information technology field when he graduates in May.

"Information technology is a huge part of any industry now," Martin said. "For example, in a steel mill, they can monitor the temperature of the steel from anywhere on the site using computer technology."

Martin's summer activities at AmerSteel included "fixing computers, interfacing with the machinery," and setting up a mail server there similar to the one he built for Erskine.

Martin says the new mail server is still a working project, and finding bugs and working them out is part of the process.

The son of Mr. and Mrs. William P. Martin of York, Martin often talks things over with his father, who is mechanically inclined and has made many repairs on farm equipment. His father recently told Martin, "You're doing what I do, except with today's tools."