To the Editor,
I have a few comments to make about Tuesday's article about the future of BlitzMail (The Dartmouth, Feb 24).
Dr. Luxon says that lack of HTML mail is a key shortcoming in BlitzMail and a reason to abandon it. If so, then why has nobody contacted me, the author of BlitzMail for Windows, to ask how much work it would be to implement it? I would not call it a major undertaking. Furthermore, HTML mail is not always as wonderful as it might seem at first. There are security and privacy issues associated with it, and there is a lot of HTML e-mail that most of us would rather not see quite so graphically. Other features, such as message filtering, could be added without a lot of effort.
He also claims that BlitzMail would be as slow as other clients if it had HTML mail. That is completely untrue. BlitzMail is fast primarily because notifications are "pushed" to the client, because enclosures are not downloaded in order to simply view a message, and because the servers are extremely effecient.
I am concerned that decisions about the future of BlitzMail are not being made responsibly. BlitzMail has been a central part of Dartmouth since 1987 because it is an excellent product. It has many features that no other e-mail program has that I'm sure would be sorely missed by many people. BlitzMail is showing its age because inadequate resources have been put into maintaining it recently. I welcome a real discussion of what is good and bad about BlitzMail, but it does not sounds like that's what's taking place here.
